appleinsider.com — Pop the lid off an Apple TV, the new wireless streaming media device from Apple, Inc., and you'll find that it's built around an aging Pentium M-based Intel processor and other yesteryear notebook technologies, according to AppleInsider.com.
Jan 14, 2007 View in Crawl 4
jerkychewJan 15, 2007
Hardware-wise, it's a pretty good deal. You could build your own HTPC with the same specs, but there's no way it would be silent for $299. A silent, comparable HTPC would cost you in the neighborhood of $400-$600, and you'd still have to configure the OS and software yourself. And to those that called the hardware 'aging' or 'out of date', the 1GHZ Pentium M is far different than the P3 or P4 Pentium Ms. My laptop is a 1.7GHZ Pentium M and it trounces my P4 3GHZ desktop. This is pretty powerful for a machine with one dedicated, optimized purpose.My question, and it's the same one I posted to Mythtv-users is, what steps is Apple going to take to prevent hackers from installing another OS on the machine? The fact that it's lacking MPEG-2 support is pretty lame - Transcoding the gigs of MPEG-2 data I have to H.264 would probably take months, so this device is a bit on the worthless side to me. However, if I could get a good, silent MythTV frontend for $299 that could stream all my MPEG-4 media as well as watch live TV, then sign me up.
tomiJan 15, 2007
@se1zure - Funny, mine does...
ntropJan 15, 2007
My question is: Will I be able to upgrade the hard drive?I already can't fit just my TV shows from iTMS onto my 60Gb iPod. I'll never be able to fit all the movies I've purchased (or ripped from my DVD collection).I also wonder if there will be an option in iTunes that lets me NOT show certain movies that might not be appropriate for "younger viewers" - perhaps "unchecking" the movie? It would be nice if Apple would allow us to attach our own ratings to movies we've ripped and then say you need a password for anything over (select rating) to be able to have it appear in the play list. Hmmm...I've pre-ordered mine, so I guess I'll find out soon...
rslcJan 15, 2007
I had thought they would use some embedded speciliased chip thats much cheaper and do the same thing.Example STB chips from Broadcom, or Sigma Design.Well, if this "rumor" is true, the fact that it uses nVidia with a general purpose intel CPU,means Apple Games will be in the pipeline.
lycolocoJan 15, 2007
Why pay $300 for something that doesn't do everything instead of paying $100 for something that does with the exception of HD playback? Xbox Media Center (free app, Xbox used costs $100) is quite possibly the best media solution out there that isn't a lot of hassle. We don't truely know yet what the codec limitations on the AppleTV are going to be, but if it only plays what you download from the iTMS as far as video goes and only mp3 and aac/iTMS tracks (like it seems that it will), well, it's not worth it to me. Now, if someone could put an Xbox Media Center style app on there, that'd be awesome. The only thing that XBMC is missing is HD playback, but if the AppleTV doesn't allow for divx/xvid playback, what nearly every single movie/tv show on BitTorrent is encded in, well, it's just another "broken" solution. What this thing really needs to knock the ball out of the park is every codec available under the sun, like XBMC has:<a class="user" href="http://xboxmediacenter.com/info_faq.htm#01">http://xboxmediacenter.com/info_faq.htm#01</a>