No I did not buy an Apple TV — but seeing them on the shelves at the local Hardly Normal has got me thinking about the dilemma-in-the-making that is my media centre dream. It all comes down to bandwidth, or lack of it to be specific. Of the two locations at the Crossed Wires campus that ideally need access to the MythTV backend (or would be good spots to put a backend instead of where it currently is, in our bedroom) neither have wired network access. My days of streaming low-bitrate MPEG4 and MP3 to XBox Media Centre over 802.11g spoilt me into thinking that all video will stream over 54Mbps… Not so television!
So, points in favour of Apple TV:
* It has convenient TV-out capability
* It should stream content from the Slug, since I installed mt-daapd/Firefly on there
* Inbuilt 802.11n, so I would just have to upgrade to N-capable Wi-Fi to solve a little of my no-wired-network woe
* It seems to be hackable, so a MythTV frontend might not be out of the question
* It’s not an XBox 360, nor is it a Playstation 3
Points against however:
* The hackability is a bit of a question mark, and not really something to rely upon (as Apple may shut the gate on any of it with a software update)
* Like I need another timewasting hardware device in the house
* Without a MythTV frontend, it doesn’t really solve any problems w.r.t the TV-watching problem (even if video can be automatically exported from MythTV in a iTunes/DAAP-friendly format, I’d need to use another interface like MythWeb or a different MythTV frontend to program the MythTV backend)
* Where’s the “TV” in “Apple TV” anyway? 🙂 (oh yeah, you plug it into one, of course… 😦 )
In a like vein, I’m trying to get LinuxMCE running (so far in a VMware guest) to see if it solves any of my backend troubles. It looks very promising, but the installer seems to be a bit crumbly — my first install attempt was without sufficient disk space; even after increasing the space the installer just couldn’t get going again. Lesson learnt, I’m doing the install again with more disk behind it to see what happens.
Crossed Wires 