As per title, I had a quick play with one at a friends, and being a gadget fiend who hasn't bought a new gadget since January (I think) I wondered if it would satisfy a craving lol.

I can't say I know loads about it, and some google searches haven't given me the info I want - essentially a list of things it can do.

So I saw you can do airplay and use it as a big screen for phone/pad, view photo stream, download movies and tv shows from iTunes.

Is there anything else? Does anyone find it something they can't live without? Or does it just sit and collect dust?

I probably wouldn't buy things from it like films and tv, does it have it own storage capability or not?

So.... pros and cons?......

it has no storage of its own, it streams everything. Although I think they are a good concept, I have never felt the need to own one despite having everything Apple at home.

I have one, use it every day, however I also have a media server that streams content to the box. My server is full of TV, Movies and Music.

I feel the Apple TV on its own is poor, half the functions it has are useless (Netflix, NBA, other crud), it doesnt have iPlayer or anything useful like that, so unless you have appropriate iTunes content(TV/Movies/Music) then imo its not worth it.

Edited 8 April, 201313 yr by Chronicbint

i would personally get WD's Offering unless your an apple fanatic. Better functionality and price without going "ooh look at me, look at me, ive got an apple TV"

Not really worth it. Had one since November and used it just a hand full of times. It doesn't really offer anything you can't get from other places, apart from seeing your photo stream on the tv but that isn't really too important in my opinion.

The wi-fi connection is also quite poor, even with the box less than a foot away from the router, it won't connect and when it does finally connect after doing a restart, it loses connection 5 mins later.

i would personally get WD's Offering unless your an apple fanatic. Better functionality and price without going "ooh look at me, look at me, ive got an apple TV"

Dont feel its that much better really. Same principle applies, if you dont have loads of your own content its fairly naff. Though it does have iPlayer, which is a bonus but then it doesn't have Airplay which is quite good.

Not really worth it. Had one since November and used it just a hand full of times. It doesn't really offer anything you can't get from other places, apart from seeing your photo stream on the tv but that isn't really too important in my opinion.

The wi-fi connection is also quite poor, even with the box less than a foot away from the router, it won't connect and when it does finally connect after doing a restart, it loses connection 5 mins later.

Sounds like you have an issue somewhere, mine streams HD content wireless perfectly.

Most set top boxes can stream content via the various services like Netflix these days.

i have an android one and its spot on, like a mini computer and ive just install XBMC ( streams films etc ) onto it and it runs sweet. all in about £50

I have one and use it all the time but I guess how much use you will get out of it depends how integrated your set up is. I must admit I use it a lot more now due to mountain lion adding airplay to the Mac OS so there is no need so much to have built in apps like iPlayer etc as you can just steam to the Apple TV.

No they're not up to much apart from airplay IMHO.

The intel NUC is a similar price and lets you do quite a lot.

You could also buy yourself a few other items that would do at least as much as the apple product.

I love my atv3.

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Sounds like you have an issue somewhere, mine streams HD content wireless perfectly.

+1

I stream HD movies using ATV & my router couldn't be further away in my house, i.e. diaganially opposite ends of the house on different floors.

Hmm it's kinda how I thought.... I figure that I wouldn't actually use one all that much..... well, until they come up with one with a few more bells and whistles

If you've got a 'smart' tv already, then it doesn't do much (if anything) that your TV doesn't already do.

Most smart TV's seem to do more than Apple TV.

Sounds like you have an issue somewhere, mine streams HD content wireless perfectly.

It does seem to be a common problem having looked around the Apple Discussion forums. :(

It does seem to be a common problem having looked around the Apple Discussion forums. :(

I think its something to do with wireless modes. A/B/G/N/AC. One of the various combo's of what is and isnt enabled on the router has a tendancy to kill connections to certain devices including the Apple TV and the Kindle Fire (non HD models).

Dont feel its that much better really. Same principle applies, if you dont have loads of your own content its fairly naff. Though it does have iPlayer, which is a bonus but then it doesn't have Airplay which is quite good.

You clearly don't know what your talking about, forget aesthetics, style, badge snobbery and blind brand loyalty for a second and look at this attached chart and tell me why the Apple TV is worth its asking price especially when some of its unforgivable omissions in functionality are realy important and supplied by its competitors USB, MKV and DTS support to mention a few. If you were to jail break the unit and install xmbc on it although giving better functionality over IOS its still not as good as the others.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-Device-Chart-Grid-090424.pdf

You clearly don't know what your talking about, forget aesthetics, style, badge snobbery and blind brand loyalty for a second and look at this attached chart and tell me why the Apple TV is worth its asking price especially when some of its unforgivable omissions in functionality are realy important and supplied by its competitors USB, MKV and DTS support to mention a few. If you were to jail break the unit and install xmbc on it although giving better functionality over IOS its still not as good as the others.

http://blog.streamin...Grid-090424.pdf

Thats all well and good but the majority of that chart is useless guff. When it boils down to the good bits the current generation WD TV is better at a few things at most. My previous media player was a WD TV TV Live(previous generation) and I binned it due to awful firmware, poor updates, slow menu system and failure to play HD content properly.

I don't believe I have mention the Apple TV is great value for money, or its aesthetics, or its style, or anything to do with badge snobbery, or its superiority to anything else. I will be trying an android box next when they mature a bit more.

Also it still rings true if you don't have your own content to stream a lot of these boxes are a bit crappy/useless.

Thats all well and good but the majority of that chart is useless guff. When it boils down to the good bits the current generation WD TV is better at a few things at most. My previous media player was a WD TV TV Live(previous generation) and I binned it due to awful firmware, poor updates, slow menu system and failure to play HD content properly.

I don't believe I have mention the Apple TV is great value for money, or its aesthetics, or its style, or anything to do with badge snobbery, or its superiority to anything else. I will be trying an android box next when they mature a bit more.

Also it still rings true if you don't have your own content to stream a lot of these boxes are a bit crappy/useless.

Its a fair point! but if your doing any shall we say 'less ethical downloading' you will struggle with an Apple as many of the higher res copies with better sound wont play. It just makes me cringe when a whole generation are not engaging their brains and buying these items purely for the apple logo. Apple haven't released anything unique or good for that matter since the demise of Steve Jobs. I had the first raft of Iphones before the sheep started to buy them right upto the 3Gs when they were simply better than all the other devices on technical Merit. But then after the iphone4 AerialGate I Realised that Apple have lost their direction and just fleecing people for every last penny they can get by rehashing old tech.

I only bought an ATV3 on a whim, was only 60 quid at the time on some offer and I had hoped it would be jailbroken by now. It mostly works great for me however I do convert all my "acquired" content from mkv to m4v.

Had one, got rid of it use PC as media centre - brill

Cheap netbook, USB infra red remote, little bit of software. Far more flexible. Not necessarily cheaper though.

Raspberry pi and xbmc, about £35 for the pi, need an SD card and some cables. That's about it. Not a powerful device though.

I have both the Apple TV (ATV2) and the WD Live TV, we don't have anything else attached to the TV and don't watch "TV" at all.

AppleTV

Pros,

Wifi or Ethernet

Can program your tv remote to work with it or use iOS app

Can stream audio / audio and video from ipad/ipad or Apple Computer (Great for stuff like 5on Demand / 4OD)

Supports Netflix / Youtube

iTunes supports UV content (triple play DVD/BlueRay etc)

Nice interface and quick

Optical out

Looks nice

Simple remote

Cons

Doesn't play off NAS / USB without jailbreak

Doesn't support on demand services

Doesn't have a huge buffer (causes problems with streaming on dodgy internet connections like virgin)

Remote is easy to lose

WD LiveTV

Pros

iOS remote app

Webpage to control using laptop

Wifi/Ethernet

iPlayer support

Optical out

Netflix / Youtube

Plays off Windows / Unix file share (NAS etc)

USB on front and back to play off usb sticks / connect keyboard

Plays almost any file type

Cons

Slow, really really slow interface

Writes crap all over your NAS / Fileshares (2 "metadata" files per video / audio file) in media library mode, file mode only shows file names and folders rather than a library structure (but is at least a bit faster)

Only supports iPlayer (no 5OD etc)

We use both as we have a fair amount of stuff on our NAS but I wouldn't really recommend the WD Live TV unless you need to play local files (even the XBMC on a computer might be better, found raspberry pi and xbmc too slow). As for the Apple TV I'd really only recommend if you have iOS or OSX devices.

found raspberry pi and xbmc too slow

How long ago was it since you last tried it? Earlier versions used no hardware acceleration at all. Newer versions are still partially software accelerated but are beginning to use hardware acceleration. Still not a speed demon though... Cheap as hell is a massive plus point. £30-£35 for a model B, an ethernet cable or USB wifi adaptor, HDMI cable and a phone charger. All you need. If you go wifi rather than ethernet you could get away with the cheaper model A maybe although it does have half the ram, not sure how much that would impact xbmc, I would guess alot. Which is another point, revision 1 or revision 2 pi? revision 2 model B pis have 512mb ram instead of the 256 of the revision 1 (and model A)