Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler AppleTV - Three days in.

I really don't know why anyone wouldn't want to get an xbox360 as a Media Centre extender (it even works with Media Player 10.0)

And the new Black HDMI xbox360 is designed to be an IPTV, beings released next month (rumored) seems like the best option to stream content from your computer. I have been waiting for the 65nm chip and HDMI, I will purchase this year I suspect.

-Hutz

Not to hi-jack the thread, but the XBOX 360 is kinda useless for streaming video content to. No DivX, quicktime, .avi of any sort. Only WMV. And in fact, I have a bunch of WMV files that it won't play for one reason or another (they show up in the menu, but say they're incompatible when I click play). Now, I'm only running Win XP, so maybe Windows MCE playes nicer, but since the 360 is essentially a PC, I don't know why they don't just allow you to load codecs on it to play whatever you want.

Actually, the XBox 360 CAN do some Divx, but you have to force it. Not trying to hi-jack this AppleTV thread, so I'll just say that a search on Google will reveal how.

Egad. I just wanted something that looked good on the rack and worked. Nothing is gonna do everything for everybody. Personally, I just don't care about the formats a certain machine doesn't support. Not anymore. I'm just done with all the format war crap. Enough. I have more important things to worry about in life. I can rip movies to h.264 or MPEG-4 using the Imtoo DVD converter tool. ATV will play ALAC and MP3 which every single one of my songs are ripped to. Done and done. I have no use for an XBOX or PS3 at all. I do all of my gaming on my gaming PC. As far as capacity, I picked up a 120GB PATA laptop drive yesterday for $85. Tonight I will dd the ATV drive to the new drive and be done with that. Damn. All things being equal, the simple way is usually best.

PS: PM, I understand your concerns about the UI, but after 2 minutes I was whizzing around the thing no problem. I like simple interfaces.

Whizzing around the thing, as in marking your territory?

Yerp, absolutely. Can't have other folk sniffin' around my toys!

Rumors of MS supporting more codecs have been floating around... of course just rumors.

Till then you can use Transcode360 to play about anything you want on a 360.

I didn't mean to back anyone into a corner with the apple speak... yes I dislike apple (as many ppl dislike MS) and they just don't offer me anything that I can use.

I do think the Media Center interface is the caddy of HTPC UI's thou... 2005 and Vista's. That's just personal preference thou.

I just get tired of the attitude people have that "if I choose A then B automatically sucks." I mean, plenty of people don't like a certain band, but does that literally mean they suck? Why can't a person just say "they're not my taste" or "I just don't like their music?" Same with anything. I have a cousin who goes absolutely batsh!t insane when anybody he knows buys a truck not made by Ford. Why? I'm not sure he even remembers the genesis of this hatred (I think it's a blood feud - his grandfather was the same way I'm told and his dad still is) of all trucks not built by Ford but it's amusing and not a little disturbing to see.

Thanks for the review. I had my credit card out and ready to preorder one until I read that it won't do SDTV. I haven't jumped on the HD bandwagon simply because there isn't enough content to justify it yet where I live (cable company sucks, can't get locals in HD via satelite, too far away for OTA, etc).

I recently purchased a DLO Homedock Deluxe Rev II from Amazon for $128, and it works very well. This is the new one that was just released a few weeks ago. Navigate songs & video from my Gen5 iPod. It's a great solution for us non-HDTV people.

Apparently is does work on SD sets as long as they have component inputs. Video is squished a little.