AppleTV and Vista Media Center
As some of you know, I love entertainment. Music, movies, TV shows, books, I love them all. I have no problem finding ways to entertain myself.
A while ago, I started the process of digitizing my DVD movie collection, along with setting up a home theater PC. A few months ago, I went through the trials of upgrading that home theater PC to Vista from XP Media Center 2005. End result: brand new hardware from top to bottom, and a beautifully functioning Vista PC. Probably one of the few in the country. This PC almost never sees the Windows Desktop, living in the Media Center menu instead. From that menu I can access the digital copies of my DVDs, all my recorded TV shows (I LOVE High-definition television) and shows I’ve purchased from the Amazon Unbox Store. What’s the Amazon Unbox store, you ask? Unbox is Amazon’s digital video download store. You can purchase or rent movies in digital form, with some restrictions about how many computers they are on, and time restrictions on the rentals. You can also purchase TV Shows. I have learned to love this feature, as my HTPC only has basic cable reception, which means no USA channel, no Showtime, no TBS. And 3 of my favorite shows are on those channels. Solution: download and install the Unbox player. Purchase shows from Amazon.com and send them to my HTPC. Then in Media Center I can browse to the Videos menu, and there is a folder full of all my Unbox video purchases. This is also great for when a schedule recording is missed, or deleted before I have a chance to watch it. One problem: not all shows are on Unbox. Some of the missing ones are on iTunes, but I learned the hard way that watching iTunes purchases on my HTPC is unpleasant, to say the least.
Enter the AppleTV. I have been wanting one of these for a while, but have never been able to justify the price when almost everything I watch is on Unbox. When the price dropped at last week’s MacWorld, it was finally low enough. Plus, I found a third TV show that was iTunes only, and a couple movies (if you haven’t seen Purple Violets, go get it.) So I grabbed the 40GB aTV from the Apple store, along with an HDMI switch (as the HTPC was using the only digital video input on my TV.) Hooked everything up, and set the aTV to sync with the shared iTunes library on my Windows Home Server (see previous post.) I chose a few TV episodes and a movie to synch to the aTV hard drive, and left the rest to stream. Video quality is AMAZING. The same TV show that was unwatchable through iTunes on my HTPC looks fantastic on the aTV. In addition to syncing with my WHS iTunes library, I also set the aTV to stream from the iTunes library on my MacBook. The MacBook is my primary library, all CDs get entered here first, and any downloaded TV shows, season passes, and podcasts are linked to this library. They are copied over to the WHS eventually, but I haven’t gotten that automated yet so it’s pretty sporadic. Oh, I mentioned podcasts? There are some really nice HD video podcasts created just for the aTV available in the iTunes store.
Now that I have legally downloadable TV shows available in both Unbox (Windows Media) and iTunes (QuickTime) format, I’m “” this close to canceling my DirecTV subscription. I haven’t turned on my DirecTiVo in weeks, my HTPC grabs my favorite TV shows in High-Def, and anything it can’t grab I can buy in good (but admittedly not best) quality online. The only thing preventing me from canceling the DirecTV is that ABC has not put any of their shows that I watch online, so the DirecTiVo is my backup source if one of my HD recordings on the HTPC gets missed, deleted, or corrupted.