The Apple TV is affordable, easy to hook up, and easy to use. Bring it home, plug it in, start it up, and really you're up and running within a couple minutes. It reminds me of the old Apple iMac "There's no step 3" ads. There isn't a lengthy setup procedure. It's simple. At $230 ($250 CDN), it's cheaper than just about any HTPC you're going to find.

Remote

The remote's a no-brainer. I'd never actually used an Apple remote before the Apple TV, and it's really intuitive to use. You basically have 4 navigational buttons (left,right,up,down), a middle button that serves as a pause/play/ok, and a menu button that's essentially the "back" button. When I was levels deep in YouTube content, I kept hitting the menu button to back up and thought "there's got to be an easier way to get back to the start. waaait, there probably is", and almost instinctively held in the menu button at that point and voila! I was brought to the main menu. Apple's still king when it comes to allowing you to do tasks with a very simple and easy to use interface.

Ripped Video

The main reason I wanted the Apple TV was (as you might assume) to watch TV shows and movies on the TV. We've ripped just about all our DVD content to a computer where we can access it from all the other computers in the house, and wanting to be able to watch it on the TV itself makes sense. I've never had an iPod and have only used iTunes in the past for listening to my mp3's on the Mac. Having to use iTunes on a computer to provide video to the Apple TV was probably the biggest challenge for me.

First, I had to re-encode just about all our ripped content. Almost all of it is in DivX or XviD format which the Apple TV won't read. Fortunately, Quicktime Pro has an Export option called "Movie to Apple TV" which converts whatever video you're watching to a format that is guaranteed to work on the Apple TV. If Quicktime can play it (it can play most codecs if you've installed the free Perian package), it can convert it. The down side is that you can't adjust any settings when using the "Movie to Apple TV" option. The first episode I converted (a 350mb DivX episode) became a 400-500mb episode after my first conversion with Quicktime, despite having *lowered* the audio bitrate. Granted it did it quickly, but that's not what I wanted. A better option (possibly the best) for converting is a program on the Mac is called VisualHub. Unfortunately it's not free, although it's only $23 USD which is quite reasonable. There's a free demo version which is pretty useless. VisualHub allows you to export to various formats, including iTunes/AppleTV. The GoNuts quality level resulted in a pretty large file size, similar to the Quicktime one. Choosing "Normal", selecting "H.264 Encoding", and "Advanced/2-pass" on the other hand resulted in a file that was only 340mb. I opened every one of the files (original, Quicktime converted, VisualHub GoNuts, and VisualHub Normal), got them all playing simultaneously, and for the particular file I did, didn't notice any real difference between them, so I stayed with the VisualHub Normal. Re-coding on the system I'm using took about an hour per 1 hour episode - pretty lengthy but seems to maintain the quality of the rips and decreases the file size a little.

Another re-coding option for the Mac is to simply use Handbrake (free) to rip from the original DVD's again. The latest version (Leopard-only) has a setting to code for Apple TV. I haven't used it just yet, but I'll be sure to give it a try and update this at that time.