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appleTV - I get it now

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:57:55 +0000

I've now spent a few days looking at the alternatives to appleTV now. Well, I say alternatives... I mean MythTV, as the idea of buying into the Windows ecosystem via WIndows Media Centre didn't even come close to crossing my mind.

But I've looked at quite a few possible configurations for a MythTV system, and I'm beginning to see the rationale for appleTV. The appleTV system is essentially:

Backend Media Server: Intended to be the house's main Mac with the big hard drive. This is the one that hosts the account that buys content from the iTunes Store, holds ripped music etc.
Frontend Client, with a local cache: This is the appleTV device. It's chiefly there to provide a UI to the backend server. But because the default use case of WiFi networking isn't deemed to be robust enough to simply stream from the backend server (particularly for HD content), it needs a local hard drive. And drives are so cheap these days, might as well make it big enough for a few items so you have some local choice without hanging around fot it.

And all this integrates with not only iTunes for music and (iTMS-sourced) video, but also iPhoto. If you stop thinking of it as the only digital media component, but just the front end to what you've already got on your Mac, it makes sense, and it'll pull people into the iApps ecosystem, which is the idea.

But to make it actually effective, it needs to be able to access video content not derived from the iTunes store. It needs to be able to show:

Home Movies (you think iMovie's going to get left out..?)
Digitally recorded TV content
Content ripped from legitimately bought DVDs

Now elgato have already managed to get eyeTV as a content source under Apple's Mac-based media client - Front Row by exporting to iTunes in iPod-friendly format, so they must be able to do the same to the appleTV. In fact, a little searching on their site shows that elgato are confident that eyeTV recordings will be usable by appleTV.

If indeed all that's needed to add a new source to the appleTV's backend server is output in H.264 or MPEG-4 and a wee bit of API smarts, then it can only be a matter of time until someone produces a DVD-ripper and transcoder that'll slot in nicely. The basics are already done:

So the basis of a pretty reasonable backend setup is starting to come together, looking like a Mac Mini, with large-ish external storage and an eyeTV Hybrid as PVR capture. Adding this up, it's probably comparable to the price of a similarly specc'd MythTV homebrew, but with much less setup required.

MythTV alternatives

The Full Myth

Meaty MythTV linux server for the backend. Low-end mythTV Linux machine for the front end. If I can't build one cheaper and quieter, then the front end machine will be the beautifully quiet and affordable Mac Mini, with OSX cleared off and replaced with Ubuntu.

The Half Myth

Watching the Keynote, the appleTV can suck content from up to 5 Macs on the LAN. Now, I'm sure someone very smart is going to find a way to get a MythTV server to appear in the list... In which case, the appleTV at £200 looks very attractive indeed as the silent front end server...

iPhone: Mostly Harmless

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:21:42 +0000

Sigh. It doesn't feel right, damning Apple with faint praise for both of their major announcements within 24 hours of their launch, but here I go anyway.

First off, let's talk about device convergence. I'm sorry, but I don't want a bundle of second rate camera/second rate music player/second rate phone. If excellence in each means keeping multiple devices, then my shirt pocket is going to have to cope. So to even get on the ballpark, Apple is going to have to convince me of the following:

That the phone actually works.: Reliably. As reliably as the non-whizzy Nokias I've known, used and loved for years now. This is the foundation competence. I used to own a Treo, having got bored transferring numbers via my brain. But the damned thing crashed with dependably high frequency, so I went back to my Nokia.
The data service is reliable and affordable and coverage is good: No idea which network carrier Apple are going to partner with in Europe. But unless it's O2, I'm not going be able to use it at all, as that's who my work phone is contracted to. And that's before I persuade my employers that data services are worth paying for.
The camera is a reasonable quality: By which I mean, the lens is semi-decent optically and the CCD has enough sensitivity and colour fidelity. Never mind pixel numbers which are largely meaningless, it's quality I want. I'm assuming here by the way that the location awareness of the device records appropriate geocoded metadata into the image file's Exif tags. Which could be very fun for moblogging to flickr.

As for the music player — yes, it's an iPod, and therefore de facto of quality. But it's an iPod nano in capacity terms, and I have 30+GB of music, and don't want to have to choose what to take with me.

But what I'm more concerned about is the interface. TheSteve made much of the lack of physical keyboard in the announcement, claiming that a similar problem had been solved in desktop computing by the bitmapped screen and mouse combo. I've news for you Steve — for any text-related function (like the email you showed off), you need a keyboard as well.

One of the most popular Palm accessories has been the wee fold-out keyboard add-on, because text entry by on-screen keyboard is truly hard. People like the physical feedback of key travel. It does wonders for speed and accuracy of entry. And small on-screen keyboards are particularly difficult, as self-confessed fat fingered friends opined yesterday; it's the devil's own job to press only one onscreen key. Unless this Multi-touch stuff is a step-change beyond what we're used to, we'll be back to stylii pretty quickly.

appleTV: Mostly Harmless

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:49:53 +0000

So, the long awaited iappleTV is properly announced and demoed. While in itself, it's all very nifty, I can't help but think that it could have been so much more.

Yes, being able to stream your iTunes video content to big screen TV is A Good Thing, although obviously better if you live in a country where Apple deign to sell you such content. But we have a reasonably large DVD collection whose physical media I'd rather put out of the reach of small children and into storage like our CDs. And when we have broadcast/Freeview TV again, I'd probably like to be able to record it digitally and recall old stuff from a large database living on hefty attached storage.

While eyeTV would probably take care of the Television end of things, for DVD rippage and storage, we're probably talking about mythTV on one of these mothers as the solution of choice for the time being.

Somebody somewhere convince me that there's a better way round this...

TomTom Are Go!

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:48:28 +0000

I got fed up of getting lost, driving between client sites in Blackpool and Preston, so I bought me a TomTom. And thanks to the magic that is eBay, I found a Palm T3 + TomTom for £150, gave the Palm to Lucy (who'd been looking for one) and ended up with Satnav for under £50 net. Result!

Talkin' 'bout my Generation

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 17:46:36 +0000

Writing this on my PDA, sat in a restaurant in Oxford.

What generation am I? I can see a family sat opposite: ma, pa + 3 daughters. The parent look, what, late 40s or so. The kids look like they've just finished their GCSEs, the A-levels + their 1st degree.

Both parents and daughters seem like my generation to me.

Similarly, I had a conversation today with a member of client staff. His daughter has just done A-levels and is going to Cambridge. She's doing science but also has a strong musical talent - sounds like me 15 years ago. He was looking for advice from me, but both as a contemporary of his and as one of hers.

Confused? I was.

But it's been the same when I've been in Edinburgh for, I don't know - 10 years now. The new crop of Freshers due into Edinburgh this October will mostly have been born in 1985. When I was a (20 year old) Fresher, they weren't even at Infant School...