Apple TV sucks, here's why.
written by Allan on May 06, 2009
I purchased Apple TV about a month ago. I have two laptops at home plus an Apple Time Capsule for my router/backup drive. We've been using AppleTV for it's intended use, purchasing media from iTunes and watching home movies. My first issue, media files cannot be just dropped onto the Apple TV hard drive. You have to network the devices together. You can network your computer's iTunes media files to your Apple TV two ways 1) Sync 2) Streamed
1) Sync does just that, it syncs the laptop to the Apple TV. So all the media purchase thru AppleTV would be synced and download to your linked device. Personally I would have 30gb of Barney episodes on my computer. This would quickly fill up my hard drive.
2) Streamed allows my AppleTV to see my iTunes libraries and play media from it. My current setup is to add an extra library to my laptop's iTunes, link the library to the home movies on the time capsule where my home movies are. Then I set Apple TV to link share my iTunes. This suck because if I am gone with my laptop you can't watch the movies on my time capsule. Kinda a bad workaround, which Apple doesn't recommend.
Now to the really sucky part
I have 160gb of space on Apple TV, not enough HD for a serious film geek.
I have about $400 worth of iTunes shows and movies on my AppleTV. The unit recently froze up. I called Apple Tech support and they instructed me to do a factory reset. This erased all my media that I purchased. It's Apple policy not to allow you to download the media again for free. What? Yes if you lose your media you can't redownload it. After me yelling for about 2 minutes they said okay and allowed me to redownload them. They insist that syncing your computer to your AppleTV is the proper solution. This doesn't seem to be a great solution because most people don't want a computer filled with their AppleTV media.
Here's what I want.
I want to drag home movies onto the Apple TV from my computer. Just like it's a mounted external hard drive.
I want to be able to plug an external HD into the back of the Apple TV and have it backup or use the drive as extra storage.
I want to be able drag a movie from AppleTV to my iPhone.
I've owned over 15 Apple products and always been overly impressed with them. Apple TV is cool, we've been renting tons of movies and enjoying the quality, but damn it, it seems Apple delivered a half ass product this time.
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Allan loves his family more than breathing. He lives in Panama City, Florida & grew up washing cars at his family's car washes. Oh and Allan hasn't worn underwear since 2004.
13 Comments
What you want is a Mac Mini. I had the same problem. My Apple TV is now in the garage and my Mini is plugged in to my TV and has a 750GB external plugged in the back with all my media on it.
@tres, I am guessing you could hook that apple tv to another tv and stream from the Mac Mini. Right?
Sure thang. My Mini is my media server. It streams to all my devices (other Macs, iPhone over 3G, and my ATV) and it’s not tied to iTunes-only content. I use Front Row mostly, but I also use Plex and Boxee as media center front ends. You can still use the apple remote for 99% of everything and I have a keyboard app on my iPhone for the other 1%.
Get yourself a Mac Mini if you don’t want to deal with an under-powered Apple TV. The Mac Mini can do everything your Apple TV can do as long as you have iTunes installed on it. And with the help of Front Row, it should work much better than the Apple TV. Installation is simple: plug it into your HDTV and use it as the monitor. Once you have your files on the computer, take out that handy Apple remote and find what you want. Although it’s a bit more expensive ($599 direct), it’s the best alternative to the Apple TV, hands down.
tried patchsticking it?
its just like jailbreaking an iphone, but even easier.
http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/
just download the application, install it on a thumb drive, plug it in your ATV, restart the ATV, it installs and then you’re done.
You’re ATV will then play DIVX files, ripped DVD’s, also play files from the network, you can also mount (DVD or HDD) drives in the USB port on the ATV.
See, I told you so: http://twitter.com/adamstac/status/1405014937
Right now I use Boxee, and not just to watch what they have listed, I snag some of my favorite RSS feeds from sources such as:
Or even http://web20show.com/ for listening to audio.
Right now they are pushing the API to get developers to get involved and develop apps, so maybe in the future someone will develop an app that helps us devs and creatives to get at content that’s already on the web that’s not quite mainstream, more niche content with RSS syndication so you can view it within Boxee.
Are you a Boxee user? What are your thoughts?
Patchstick the ATV, install NitoTV and enable the USB port for external drives…you can then store your media locally on your ATV. Whats even better is if you use NitoTV to install MacFUSE and then get MacFusion on your apple. This allows you to ‘mount’ the drive on the Apple TV to your computer so you can just copy files straight to the USB drive…
I agree 110%. Maybe 120%.
To all the people out there who are saying “just buy a Mini”, hey Rockefellers: don’t know if you noticed, but the economy sucks and when I plopped down over $350 for the Apple TV and the AppleCare I wasn’t planning on buying a whole new computer.
I have an external for backing up my media but what I wanted was a place to keep all the big video files (Yo Gabba Gabba takes up a lot of space). The fact that I could watch them on my TV seemed perfect. Then after a couple weeks it clicked: no, I couldn’t manually manage the content on my Apple TV. My computer either has to be on, or I have to have it stored on a system currently syncing with the Apple TV.
This is utterly, intensely stupid. Add on to that that it doesn’t seem to be a hardware limitation, just a baloney cap put on the unit by Apple corporate. I’m hugely disappointed with this thing and I can’t tell enough people to totally avoid buying one.
“Buy a Mac Mini”… nice. That’s not what the dude with the nose-ring in the Apple Store.
“Patchsticking” sounds interesting though…
a mini is all good but to watch your hd movies through the mini dvi or usb ports on a big screen would not be as nice as the hdmi on the apple tv.
Hey there ! I use Nitro on the apple tv and all my movies are stored on the time capsule which sits under the apple tv and is connected to it . Where is the problem ?
Cheers
Hey there ! I use Nitro on the apple tv and all my movies are stored on the time capsule which sits under the apple tv and is connected to it . Where is the problem ?
Cheers
Why would you buy anything on the iTunes store on the ATV. That’s your biggest problem. I rent sometimes but would never buy.
Why would you buy anything on the iTunes store on the ATV. That’s your biggest problem. I rent sometimes but would never buy.