I just spotted this, and Im wondering what yall think. Its Mac+PC compatible
Could make a nice addition to your projector given its size... but im not sure the price tag would be warranted for some... but its got component and HDMI output, wich is pretty cool, and if it outputs true HD over component, that might make it worth it for some.

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebO...mp;nclm=AppleTV

I think that at first people will not quite get AppleTV; however, it will soon open up a whole new market for Apple. People will also realize how it will make their lives easier. Think about it, while Sony and Toshiba are going to be fighting about blueray or HDdvd Apple is going to be selling HD movies right to the consumer without the interim media. Most people will love getting actual HD movies without having to have a mountain of plastic disks. People will be able to burn the disks themselves if they so choose; however, I bet that most people will choose to stop collecting the disks and start collecting mass storage media like hard drives and such. Imagine taking your entire video library on a removable drive that you can carry with you. Heck, it is even easier to back up your entire library by just transferring the data between drives. Remember formats go obsolete. People want the data. I think that blueray and HDdvd will both be rather short lived formats.

Very good points,
kind of what i was thinking too. Upon first glance i was like, "why the hell would you want that?"... but what your saying makes sense. Plus its so cute and small, you could easily mount that puppy on your PJ, and only have a power cord to deal with.

I was just going to post about this yoshuaspawn, you beat me to it.

I'm a a quandary at the moment. Having bought an Evo I want something in between my imac and projector to show my movies. I've tried standard definition dvd's with the Evo and they look great. But, looking at others posters 720p signal pictures I want the box in between to be able to either upscale existing content and/or show native HD content.

I've used a Pixel Magic HD mediabox and I thought it was excellent. However Apple bring out a shiny new gadget and I immediately want to buy. Price wise it's very reasonable and although its just 720p/1080i it would still work fantastically with the evo.

I could go DIY with a htpc but cost wise I can't do it cheaper than either of these products. Plus both are smaller.

What do you all think?

Basically, it's just another computer, although a very specialized one limited to the functions it was designed for. It is in essence the layman's HTPC. Capable of 720p, sportin' HDMI and Component, and for three bills, it ain't a bad deal at all. Just remember though... Only 40 GB hard drive in it. Better invest in a NAS with at least 500GB if you are seriously considering moving away from physical media such as CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, etc.

Great idea though. It does what most people wanted the mac mini to do anyway.

It looks like a nice device, why can't any other HW vendor do products this nice? Good freatures and reasonable price.

The problem I see with it is its limited format support, from the apple website Apple TV tech specs:


"Video

• Video formats supported: H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): 640 by 480, 30 fps, LC version of Baseline Profile; 320 by 240, 30 fps, Baseline profile up to Level 1.3; 1280 by 720, 24 fps, Progressive Main Profile. MPEG-4: 640 by 480, 30 fps, Simple Profile"

So it only supports H.264 and MPEG-4 (no MPEG 2 no Divx) if you want to buy your movies/TV shows from iTunes then it will work great but the majority of media on the web isn't in these formats. It only does 720p in one of the formats others are limited to 640x480 or 320x240. There are other media players with better specs, probably with lame user interfaces. Lack of format support is a deal breaker for me.

Sounds like a good reason to save space and convert the video you have to H.264 or MPEG-4 to me. Also, I wonder if the storage capacity will be expandable. Doesn't it have USB 2.0? It sounds like an external HD would fit right on.

Hmm. I know i wouldnt touch this if it dosent support divx OR MPEG2. But thats really suprising... I mean, you can buy MPEG2 support for quicktime. Almost all of my quicktime stuff is .avi / divx! It wouldnt play those??pretty lame if thats the case.

you can put an external HD on there. It would be swell if it was firewire instead of USB2.0, but thats part of what keeps the price down im guessing.

You can play DivX .avi files in quicktime/itunes you just need to do this first...

"Open the AVI file with QuickTime Player, go to the File menu and choose Save As..., and then pick "Reference movie" as destination format. QuickTime Player will generate a small MOV file that acts as an alias to the original AVI movie -- and this reference file can be added to iTunes. iTunes will let you add metadata to the reference MOV file, and will play the original AVI if instructed to do so. Note that if you remove the original AVI file, iTunes will obviously not be able to play it, even if the title still appears in its database. Also, reference movies are still somewhat big for what they are worth (around 1 to 3 MB each)."
source: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...051013124423475

I'm still unsure whether to go for this or the Pixel Magic HD Mediabox

You know I really don't think my eyes will care much whether I am watching 720P or 1080p, so that is not my primary concern. There is one thing that I think will make Apple's box much more useful to me and that is 802.11n wireless networking. Also, having an actual intel processor in it means that it can be hacked and programmed.

cool
thanks for that

Well for me a 40gig drive is just too small up to 50hrs it says
most lickly at native dvd quallity, so around 33 movies. at 90min each not too good now how many moves will fit onto it using hd-dvd format? deff. will be adding a second hd to the mix.
so why not just buy a 250gig or 500gig. 250gig will cost prob less and clutter

just my 299.00-199.98C worth