The $99 Apple TV Wireless HD Digital Media Player Preview

A First Look at Apple TV’s User Interface

After unboxing the Apple TV, we attached it to our home theater and our home network. Even though the Apple TV has built-in WiFi-N, we wanted to make sure we had the maximum speed configured to play our media files.

We found that this box was definitely wasn’t “plug-and-play” like many of the other HD media players that we have reviewed here. Apple certainly designed their player around on-demand multimedia content such as Netflix, YouTube, and Flickr.

Setting up our Netflix account was very straightforward. After giving it our username and password, the Netflix GUI popped up instantly. Netflix on the Apple TV allowed us to browse by category, search, or use suggested titles.

When we tried to play our own content however, things were not as easy. Since we have a very large collection of High-Definition MKV and AVI files, we really have an interest is playing them though our latest media streamer. Well, the Apple TV only recognized a few “containers” and codecs so you have to convert your video file to something Apple TV (and iTunes) can understand. Luckily, we had some MP4 files around so we ‘dropped-and-dragged’ our file into iTunes and moments later we were able to play the file on our Apple TV.

That’s quite a lot of work for those of us who have tons of movies (and
home videos) on our hard drives. The thought of converting all those
files is really not something I’m looking forward to.

Viewing pictures was no walk in park either. You have to make sure the photos you want to view on the Apple TV are located on the same disk. You are able to choose the directories that you want to view, but organizing them on the Apple TV is almost impossible. Like the music files, they are listed in alphabetical order. Not pretty when you have thousands of photos.

Hopefully, over the next few days we will get more familiar with the Apple TV and discover some shortcuts that we didn’t initially see.