Wonder what's happening at Blogger. Had quite a number of problems since I "upgraded" to this Google blogger. Typed an entire page and only the heading appeared. Sheesh..

Anyway. I've hooked up the ATV, sycn-ed it with my eMac and streamed the rest of my videos from my powerbook. ATV comes with an in-built 40GB hard disk which is way inadequate. I mean nowadays storage is quite cheap. So Apple could have included a, say, 120GB hard disk. I did a search and as expected, there're already quite a lot of sites explaining how to hack the ATV. A few even managed to modify the ATV so that it could play other video formats. I don't want to void the warranty just yet. So I'll not open up the ATV for the time being. Luckily streaming was smooth and fast. I did shift my hardware around to ensure full bar in the internet connection. Btw I used wireless even though wire-internet is recommended. So far I have no problem.

I watched Heroes episode 20, CSI NY episode 22, and Casino Royale on Sunday. That's about 4 hours of AppleTV. The Heroes and CSI NY were converted from AVI to ATV compatible H.264 format using ViddyUp. Quality was quite alright when viewed on LCD TV. Better than VCD but not DVD quality. Slight pixelisation and color banding were still detectable. Bottom-line is, if you want DVD quality.. don't get ATV. It's not there yet.

Casino Royale was converted using iPod settings. So quality was not as good those converted with ATV settings. Hence for reasonably good viewing quality through ATV, I'll need to re-convert all my videos using ATV settings. However iPod can't read mp4 files converted using ATV settings. Which means that if I want to have a copy on my iPod I need to do another seperate conversion. That means serious storage capacity because I would have 3 video formats (including AVI format) for every video I own.

My husband wondered what's all the fuss about and prefers to pop a DVD into the player. I told him I'm a big Apple Fan. So guess what I'm saving up for next?