Apple Tv

From simplygizmos

Everyone of us are familier with the cute gadget iPod from Apple. Its sleek design and smooth ui has conquered us. iTunes helps to manage online multimedia content which can be easily downloaded to iPods and home PCs. The system works very well for audio, but viewing video in the small screen of an iPod or a computer is not as pleasing an experience as viewing a movie in a high definition TV, sitting relaxed in a sofa. For those who want such an experience for videos from iTunes, here comes the Apple TV.



The contents from iTunes in an OS X or Windows computer can be viewed in a high definition television or enhanced definition television set using Apple TV as a mediator. It has the HDMI or component video connections to connect to the television. Connections to other computers can be made through Ethernet or wirelessly through IEEE 802.11b, g, n wireless protocols. Apple TV can sync automatically with the iTunes library and playlists and download the contents into its 40GB harddisk. After syncing, the Apple TV is not required to be connected to the computer to view the contents in a TV. It is also possible to show streaming video without saving it in the harddisk. The TV interface contains a nice menu which can be navigated using a remote provided by Apple for the full TV experience.

Apple TV is capable of connecting to iTunes directly and get free contents like podcasts, movie trailers and previews of iTunes music. A drawback is that all content types supported in iTunes are not supported by Apple TV. So care should be taken which all contents are selected to be synced or else it will result in an error message. Apple has worked on this problem to an extent that they have included an option "Export to Apple TV" in the latest Quicktime players to convert some of the unsupported formats to the supported ones.