First, my friends, look over the damning discussion of this item on engadget: <http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/itv-becomes-apple-tv/>.
I ordered one such unit the same day Stevie announced it, then looked at the specs and realized that it was just another Apple gimmick to keep people bound to the iTunes, iPod, and iTunes Music Store bundle. Believe me, I've been an Apple user for 20 years now and I spend hours each day on my Apple computer, but I've become wary of the ways Jobs seeks lock-in. Just look at the messy and annoying DRM at the core of all of the Apple entertainment technologies. Worse, Apple could have offered a credible replacement for those dreadful set-top boxes we are usually forced to lease from the cable providers, but the Apple TV simply isn't a credible solution to that. Slim has been heroic in support of open-source and fair-use solutions for content, and it remains largely agnostic with respect to formats and platforms. Bravo! I'm building essentially the "entertainment hub" Apple TV claims to be. It's pretty simple: take an old but not ancient laptop, load linux or a hacked MacOSX on it, run Slim as either server-client or just client, attach a Pinnacle HD Pro tuner stick on it, etc. For the real expert, try mythtv. Also consider the forthcoming Netgear EVA8000 which will have far better capabilities than the Apple device, and will prolly cost a good bit less. Also consider the new variant on the SlingBox. Remember that with AppleTV, you still need a DVD drive and some way to control that, and good luck trying to install any codecs on it that are not blessed by Steve. -- rfrost ------------------------------------------------------------------------ rfrost's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5532 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31559 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
