For those of us with thousands of digital images, when do we ever trot them out and look at them? Rarely. The Apple TV Gen 1 is a photographer's dream. I bought it used on eBay for $125 and wouldn't sell it back even for more than that.Īh, there is a major void here. That's for people with more time than money, or insomniacs going on an extended cruise or something where there's no possibility of reliable internet.ĪTV1Gen has proven to be a keeper. With some effort, you can get around this by converting movies beforehand, but I won't go into that. But non-DRM content like MP3 and Home movies play without a network connection. So we can stream music to it from any device in the house, even the other ATV, which is nice if you like background music while working or when entertaining.Īlthough it has a hard drive, even if you pre-fill it with rented movies to take it with you, it still requires an internet connection to authorize the playback, so it's not really "untethered" from the internet for DRM movies. Only the hacked ATV1Gen can accept streams from another Apple TV later generations of ATV cannot share between each other. We also hacked it with RemoteHD to be Airplay capable, and have it connected to the analog inputs of our tuner downstairs. Personally, we don't see much difference and we already have the thing so I say "Save the money." We rent a lot of stuff with friends over, and not one has ever asked "What's wrong with the resolution of the movie? Are you up-converting it?" I know, some of you will say it's big difference to you. It looks so good on our TV only a video freak would notice the difference without a side-by-side comparison. The SD version is not some crappy, old low quality 4:3 television image. Since the ATV and our Sony HD television are both capable of up-converting, we usually buy the SD version and save about $50 a year in movie rentals. At least on our ATV 2nd Gen, only the HD version of movies is offered. There is a money saving difference that no one here mentioned: the first option with all movies on the ATV1Gen is to rent the SD version for a dollar less than the HD version. At times either of these have been connected to the same Sony 42" HDTV. We have a 1st Gen ATV plus a 2nd Gen ATV. You can see all the differences on their wiki page, it lays out the differences in features between the devices and even talks about most of the hacks that are available. They are also significantly smaller too, the older Apple TVs are much larger. The new Apple TV's require internet of some kind or at least a local network for stream video and movies and data from a computer or the internet. And since they aren't sold any more and are still sought after, that would explain their above average price. Though the biggest reason is most likely the hack-ability of them, they are tiny computers with a decent amount of power. Some people like the older ones also because they can be hacked and used as linux computers ( link) with actual storage and since they can also store things on them, you can take it with you and have videos/music on it and not require internet for streaming your content. The 1080 HD playback is nice, but depending on your TV, may or may not be noticeable/important. Airplay is probably the biggest feature that makes people who don't want to hack to jump ship to the newer box. The new Apple TV's do not have hard drives or Component Cable outputs and support Airplay out of the box. There are also a few other minor differences in size, power consumption, software options/OS and so on. Also, the newest Apple TV, the 3rd Gen, allows for 1080p HD playback, where the older ones only support 720p HD playback. They also do not support Airplay with out a hack or a software fix. The other things is that they can connect to TV's through Red, Blue, Green Component Cables. The only super major differences the 1st Gen Apple TV's has from the new ones is the ability to store Movies, Music, Content, etc because they have a physical hard drive in them for doing those things.
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