Whilst worshipping at the Apple Centre yesterday, I had a go on the Apple TV device. I must say it’s a very nice piece of kit - Apple’s approach to usability certainly shines through and is very simple to operate compared to my very clumsy Netgear EVA700.
However videos from iTunes look pretty awful on a big screen, which means the only way to get a decent picture is to code your own videos from DVDs. This however is a painfully lengthy process. Unfortunately for Apple I don’t see how this device can really take off until it provides a function in iTunes to rip DVDs to movie files… most people don’t want to mess with third party recoding devices and won’t want to repurchase a movie from iTunes store if they already have it on DVD, and more importantly, they shouldn’t have to.
