On Monday I bought an Apple TV, a gizmo I had long eyed but could not persuade myself was necessary. I was sick at home over the weekend, searching in vain for anything slightly interesting on HD cable. One can endure only so many programs about house flipping and mega disasters before cracking. Since Time Warner Cable still isn’t offering any HD on demand programming, I felt the time had come for Apple TV. Synching up my limited video collection was an easy, if lengthy, process, and the quality of my non-HD iTunes purchases is decent, and certainly better than watching them on my laptop computer.
The true revelation of Apple TV is the photo browsing. Photos are far more compelling on a big screen, so much so that I have recropped a substantial portion of my iPhoto albums to the 9x16 ratio. Better still, the Flickr browser is astonishing. I have rediscovered my contacts’ photostreams, and I have a whole new appreciation for the efforts they’ve put into their photos. Those 500-pixel default views just don’t do justice to the photos. My only complaint is that the Flickr browser has no login authentication, as the YouTube browser does, so you can only view public photos.
Now I’m working on the slow and tedious process of ripping DVDs to MPEG4. Since my not-so-old DVD player kicked the bucket, I’ve been missing my AbFab videos.
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