Yeah, so I've had about 5 hours now of play time with the AppleTV since last night and all I can say damn this thing rules! I took the hard drive out, voided the warranty in the process and dropped it into my portable firewire enclosure. Copied over my intel version of sshd from my iMac, nano, a couple of codecs in there for the time being and sealed it all back up. And then, go figure, it booted right up like it should as if it hadn't just been brutally violated. I brought up my terminal and tried to ssh to it and nothing happend. :( So I tried again. Nothing. Then I tried by IP address instead of Rendezvous name (sorry, BonJour now) and it said connection refused. WTF? I thought they said it didn't have the firewall enabled? Well, if there's no firewall and it refused, it must be working. So I tried again via name and I was asked for the password. TaDA! It must have just been generating the RSA junk the first time it was hit and just took a while. Typed in the password and was presented with a bash prompt. So now it's all ready to be hacked up.

Not that I had anything in mind as far as command line went to do right now, but I wanted to test its abilities. First thing is I wanted to try out the new svn compile of HandBrake I made earlier in the week and see if anamorphic and 5.1 aac was working. So I ripped 2 chapters out of one episode of Deadwood, imported to iTunes and ran out to the living room. There it was waiting on the screen. Hit play and it was perfect. Correct aspect ratio taking up the full screen and all. It looked gorgeous and damn near pixel perfect to the dvd at only 3mb/s h.264. The only thing not too perfect was the audio, but I knew that going in. The receiver just thinks it's stereo and is applying Dolby Pro Logic.

So then I tried a 5.1 audio test (someone saying “left”,”center”, etc) to see the extent of what the 5.1 issues are for myself and it was kind of disheartening. I only have a receiver that can do DPL I, and it was interpreted as:
Front Left = Front Left + very quiet in both rear
Center = Center
Front Right = Front Right + very quiet in both rear
Rear Right = Front Right + very quiet in both rear
Rear Left = Front Left + very quiet in both rear
Sub = nothing (then again, I don't have a dedicated sub)

So, essentially, it's a little less than DPL I as the rear should be just rear. So, 3.0? Anyways, for now that's good enough because the hardware is there as the audio chip inside the AppleTV is capable of up to 7.1 and it uses optical out. It's really just coming down to software and with an eager community behind this it's only going to be a matter of time before either 5.1 aac is sent out as AC3 or DPL II. Or perhaps Apple will bring that in an update. The pieces are all here, it's probably just going to play out like when the video iPod got 640×480 output as if it was magic. The other option would be to find a receiver that understands aac 5.1 and then wait for an output option on the AppleTV to not downmix it. But either way, I feel that encoding to 5.1 aac will be the way to future proof it for now.

However, this is all beside the point of how freakin' awesome it is to browse your collection on your tv from your couch. I've loaded up my iTunes with all sorts of videos and crap due to wanting to sync with the iPod, but I've never watched a single second of it in front of my computer. It's still sitting there in the iTunes library, though. All of a sudden, there it all was available at a click on the tv. Not too mention 5 gigs of photos that play as a screensaver while the music plays that won't be interrupted if you click forward or back. My only gripe is my own and that's that I ripped all that content to play on the iPod. It looks ok, but it could look so much better with the increased h.264 abilities of the AppleTV.

So now I'm thinking what really needs to happen is I need to set up a massive storage solution that I can store everything I have, linked with iTunes and streamed to the AppleTV. I'm talking tv shows, dvds, movie clips and music. And I'll have to get going on either re-encoding what I have for better quality or encoding for the first time.

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