Chuck and I pre-ordered an Apple TV right after MacWorld back in January, and it finally arrived late last week. We had already received and set up a new 802.11n base station (and it is a VAST improvement over their earlier models, for anybody who’s pondering a switch or upgrade). We plugged it in and were immediately able to enter the passcode to start streaming to our big screen TV! Rockin’! Sort of.
Thing was, it didn’t really work – it would appear to work and then not. Basically, it didn’t stay connected to either of our G5’s long enough to actually stream any content. We tried my MacBook Pro and it streamed happily away, but the good content was on my G5, and it didn’t like Apple TV. At all. Chuck spent a few hours on the phone with Apple support (and they were as intrigued and curious about the problem as us, given that so few people have Apple TV units yet). We finally figured out the problem – a few weeks back we had gotten scared into installing virus protection software on our G5’s (okay, we read a scary article and fell for the advertising pitch; call us suckers). Anyway, once we uninstalled all of that software, things were cooking. Sort of.
Somehow in trying to make things work, we disabled all audio from the DVD player to the receiver, and after some mucking about were able to get partial audio – all of the background with none of the dialog. Weird. This mattered because by this time we had moved on from Apple TV and wanted to watch Rocky Balboa, We made it through about 15 minutes of the movie (which, by the way, is a great movie – if you liked the very first Rocky you’re going to love this one!) before we clued into this – we just thought the movie had strange audio as we briefly got audio from the TV which was on a channel showing Da Ali G Show, whose dialog bizarrely fit the early scenes of the movie, like a really wild accidental video mashup.
Okay, admittedly that was operator error. Still, it was caused by the fact that we had SO MANY cables behind the receiver and DVD player that we could never figure out how to add anything new without disconnecting something else.
This started a conversation about the glories of HDMI, which Apple TV happens to use. It’ll do other connections like component, of course, but it looks coolest using HDMI. And HDMI is way less complicated, and eliminates a ton of cables because one nifty cable does all your video and all your sound! How, you ask? Magic!
Unfortunately for us and our HDMI dreams, our receiver (because we have the big ass sound system) didn’t have HDMI. Nor did our DVD player. Well when we commit to a technology, we BY GOD commit to that technology – it was all HDMI for us, none of that stinkin’ component crap if we could avoid it! So off we went to Best Buy where their crummy selection soon sent us off to the far superior Ken Crane’s. And $2600 later we had us a new Pioneer Elite receiver with four, count ’em, FOUR HDMI inputs! We’re talking room to grow here, kids! Oh, and we also picked up a new Pioneer Elite DVD player with HDMI AND a new center speaker (um, because) AND we also picked up four HDMI cables. So yesterday everything arrived, and we tore apart the media center in the living room and got everything up and running. We tested it all out on Spiderman and were all very impressed by the depth and clarity of the HDMI picture and sound. Seemed like a $2600 picture to me!