Why AppleTV Is Very Important To This Project

Posted on 4:49 pm by Paul Colligan
Apple TV is very important to the Year of Living Digitally project. Here’s why:

In our grand mix of Akimbo, Amazon Unbox, Windows Media Center, Tversity, etc., we can stream our content to our television with very little problem. The picture quality is fine with very few complaints - but one.

The interface for surfing these things is horrid - no matter what product you use. We’re a Tivo family, remember and we liked it when it was easy to find what we were looking for. It isn’t even close.

In all fairness, I haven’t used Windows Media Center Vista yet but what glimpses I got at CES lead me to believe that it looks a lot prettier - but it still hard to find stuff.

I believe AppleTV, if it is anything like Apple Front Row, will make the process a lot easier. Of course, I won’t know until I can put one to use here at the home lab.

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Filed under Windows Media Center, Apple, iTV | Permalink | Print • 3 Comments

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January 12, 2007

Elsewhere at Colligan.com This Week | Paul Colligan’s Profitable Podcasting (Pingback)

[…] At Year of Living Digitally: The experiment is going strong and we’re learning a lot of things about what’s missing in the world of interface design. Gut tells us that Apple TV will be the solution we are looking for, so we’ll just have to wait for delivery. […]

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January 14, 2007

Andrew Grant said:

Eh?

Media Center’s interface is horrid? I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say such a thing. I do miss the full-fidelity of Media Center’s interface on V1 extenders, but it’ still pretty good and certainly better than the majority of cable boxes.

PS - please add the ’subscribe to comments’ plugin to your Wordpress blog :) (at least I think it’s Wordpress!).

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January 17, 2007

Paul Colligan said:

I only have two things to compare the interface to - my previous Tivo and FrontRow on my Apple MacBook Pro. When comparing to these two - Media Center comes in 3rd place.

For example. I converted a batch of kids shows to WMV for my kids. The interface has each of them as images, each with the first 10 characters or so - so there is no way to tell which file is what. They all look the same and they have to play the files to figure out which ones they are. Need more than that.

Is there a way to view videos as a list? The old “file list” I have in Windows?

I’ll see about subscribing to comments.

Paul

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