thre3

33. Married. OCD. Mac/Linux User. Cyclist. Eating Disorder Survivor. Geek. Photographer. Paintball Addict. Stubborn. Shallow. Design Whore.

“Do you know what you’re supposed to do to meet a mermaid. You go down to the bottom of the sea where the water’s not even blue anymore and the sky’s only a memory, a thought in the silence. And you stay there. Then you decide that you’ll die for them. Only then do they start coming out. They come and they greet you and they judge the love that you have for them, if it’s sincere, if it’s pure, they’ll be with you, take you away forever.”

Apple TV Experience

We bought an Apple TV last month for our anniversary. I suppose more specifically, “I” bought an Apple TV. Last year I digitized my entire DVD collection and stored it on a 1TB external USB drive. I thought it would be more convenient but the only device that we had that would recognize the drive was the Xbox 360. It worked but you needed to login to your account and click through multiple menus before you were actually able to get to the movie library. The quality wasn’t spectacular either but that could be related to the settings used to transcode everything in Handbrake.

The Apple TV works exactly as advertised. It syncs directly with multiple iTunes sources and allows you to watch your movies, tv shows, listen to music, audio books or browse through photographs. The image quality when you download movies from iTunes is slightly better than standard DVD but it certainly isn’t Blu-ray. So if you are a videophile you probably still end up purchasing Blu-ray for highly visual films like Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. For a lot of popular titles, you can actually get them for $15 if you’re patient enough to wait for Blockbuster to shift them to the “previously viewed” shelf. The major benefit though is that you’re able to have a digital copy of the movie for your iPhone, MacBook Pro (MBP) and Apple TV with one purchase and no transcoding. There is also the fact that you can download TV shows that you missed for $1.99 - $3.99. We really like this feature since we were downloading shows to the MBP before and watching them through the HDMI input on the TV.

The only negative is the “convenience” of being able to purchase movies without actually having to go outside. I wonder if there is a way to set a budget in iTunes.