JF Mezei

re: Apple TV:

If you can stream movies/music from your real Mac to the Apple TV over
ethernet/wi-fi, then the need for storage on the Apple TV goes away. You
buy/rent movies on your Mac and use your Apple TV as a glorified
graphics card which displays the content on your TV/stereo.

Perhaps Apple should have put the "stream from your computer"
functionality ahead of "rent movies from Itines" in the marketing of the
new apple TV.

Your Name

"Larry" <noone@home.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9DE87E57CA17Fnoonehomecom@74.209.131.13...
>
> I can ruin an iPad sale at Best Buy by simply browsing the iPad to
> news.google.com and clicking on any of the common embedded video links it
> won't play. "Videos and Flash like that won't play.", is all I have to
> tell the buyer.
>
> Case closed. If it doesn't play the content, crappy or not as your
> reality distortion view insists, if it doesn't play the content, the
> device is crap! iPad/phone is crap.

Moron! :-\

Good grief, you're simply one of those brainless religious nutters who
insist on trying to "convert" everyone even when they don't actually want to
be converted ... and like those brainless religious nutters, you have
absolutely no clue what you're talking about. :-\

It's extremely simple: if YOU don't like the product then YOU don't have to
buy ... but go away and leave the rest of us who do like it alone.

Lloyd Parsons

In article <4c816003$0$21136$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com>,
JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:

> Lloyd Parsons wrote:
>
> > 1. That the 'tsunami of Android-based tablets' will happen and work
> > well. So far, that is certainly not a given if you care to look about.
> > Lots of talk and 'coming soon', but no good product shipping yet.
>
> Wrong.
>
> http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/
>
Well, not quite shipping as the price is yet to be determined it seems :

http://www.informationweek.com/news/...rticle.jhtml?a
rticleID=227300206&subSection=News

But if any of the prices indicated in that article are even close to
true, it will be a marketplace dud I suspect.

> (requires flash to view).
>
> Launched this week.
>
> Toshiba is also launching a tablet this week.
>
So, not shipping either...

Maybe I'm not so wrong at the time and day I posted that after all...

>
> With regards to Adobe finally get Flash working on mobile devices, that
> remains to be seen. I donLt think Adobe is able to write good software
> anymore.

Me too.

While I'm no lover of flash, it is out there in lots of places and it
would be nice if they could get their shit together and get this done.
Or just say they can't!

--
Lloyd

Lloyd Parsons

In article <4c816389$0$2097$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com>,
JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:

> re: Apple TV:
>
> If you can stream movies/music from your real Mac to the Apple TV over
> ethernet/wi-fi, then the need for storage on the Apple TV goes away. You
> buy/rent movies on your Mac and use your Apple TV as a glorified
> graphics card which displays the content on your TV/stereo.
>
> Perhaps Apple should have put the "stream from your computer"
> functionality ahead of "rent movies from Itines" in the marketing of the
> new apple TV.

The old one, and the new one I think, can stream from your iTunes
library on your computer.

But the new one, with no storage can't do it any other way, that is a
deficiency, imo.

That said, the old ATV didn't exactly catch on like wildfire either...

--
Lloyd

SMS

On 9/3/2010 2:07 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
> re: Apple TV:
>
> If you can stream movies/music from your real Mac to the Apple TV over
> ethernet/wi-fi, then the need for storage on the Apple TV goes away.

It's really nice not to have to use your Mac (or Windows machine for
that matter) as storage for movies, and always have to have it running
to watch a movie. An external 1TB drive is under $100 and can store
around 200 standard definition movies.

I'd rather through together a mini-ITX machine as a video server near
the TV than to have to deal with Apple TV, and a Mac, and a router.

SMS

On 9/3/2010 1:41 PM, JF Mezei wrote:

> So Mr Jobs needs to be careful with his rethoric. Forceful rethoric can
> help kill flash, but if it doesn't work, he will have cornered himself
> into a difficult situation when he needs to do a 180°.

It won't be difficult at all for Apple to get out of this situation. The
general public isn't going to hold any sort of grudge, they just want
Flash. The fanbois will defend any decision Apple makes, and explain any
180° turn with their usual rhetoric. The publicity will all favor Apple,
and protestations by Samsung, Toshiba, etc., that "we had Flash first,
we made them add it" will be of no consequence. Adobe will let Apple
save face--Apple will just say that 'Adobe has made changes that have
satisfied our original concerns.'

You know that Consumer Reports is going to do an article comparing the
different tablets, and they have enormous influences, as the iPhone
antenna issue demonstrated.

In the meantime, Flash is available for the iPad, just not in a
straightforward way. Apple seems to enjoy making people go through hoops
to add functionality that is left out of products.

BreadWithSpam@fractious.net

SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> writes:

> Soon, Flash support is going to be check-off requirement for consumers
> deciding which tablet to purchase. The fact that the iPad requires

Flash-blocking may also be a similarly important "check-off
requirement". It already is for many of us for browsers.

> jailbreaking to be able to support Flash is going to be a big
> issue. The key thing now is for Apple to find a face-saving way of
> adding Flash support to the iPad before Android tablets can take off.

If Adobe comes out with an excellent version of Flash which actually
doesn't suck the life out of batteries and enough Apple users tell Apple
that they want it (and Apple doesn't care what folks say here on
usenet), Apple will respond.

Thus far, that markets haven't convinced Apple to add technologies they
were trying to avoid to their other products (various video and audio
formats on iPods, for example). At the moment, the tablet market is
effectively 100% Apple's. If they start really fearing losing enough
users to competing devices with Flash, they have incentive to try to get
it to work. So far, cheers to Apple for not wasting our time, batteries
and bandwidth.


--
Plain Bread alone for e-mail, thanks. The rest gets trashed.

BreadWithSpam@fractious.net

SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com> writes:
> On 9/3/2010 9:44 AM, BreadWithSpam@fractious.net wrote:

[Apple TV seems more attractive than HDMI from one's laptop:]

>> Of if you don't want to muck about with wires and cords and finding
>> a place for the laptop next to the TV.
>>
>> I've been there, and it stinks. $99 to have all my iMedia available
>> over my home network? That's a pretty good deal. The access to
>> other stuff, and the ability to control it from the iPhone? I think

> What I did was to place a laptop dock under the TV that has digital
> video, SP/DIF, and USB ports. The laptop drops in, connects to a 1TB
> drive with music and videos, to the TV and audio system, and to a
> second power brick for the laptop. I could use wired networking too,
> but the Wi-Fi is sufficient.

Wow - all that just to avoid spending $99 on a box the size of a pack of
cards? You're making the AppleTV sound better and better.

> The removal of storage from the Apple TV is okay, but they should have
> allowed an external drive. Only streaming via iTunes is unacceptable.

I wonder what the additional cost would have been - not just hardware
(that's probably about $10), but software, development and customer
support.

I also wonder if the AppleTV will work to pull streams from things like
the Western Digital World Edition II NAS device. I'm still mulling one
over for managing networked backups and as a media server.

I'm also thinking about getting an Airport Extreme base station to
replace my d-link, not least because it's got a USB port and can act as
a network server. Anyone know if that could feed media to an AppleTV?

--
Plain Bread alone for e-mail, thanks. The rest gets trashed.

SMS

On 9/3/2010 3:35 PM, BreadWithSpam@fractious.net wrote:
> SMS<scharf.steven@geemail.com> writes:
>> On 9/3/2010 9:44 AM, BreadWithSpam@fractious.net wrote:
>
> [Apple TV seems more attractive than HDMI from one's laptop:]
>
>>> Of if you don't want to muck about with wires and cords and finding
>>> a place for the laptop next to the TV.
>>>
>>> I've been there, and it stinks. $99 to have all my iMedia available
>>> over my home network? That's a pretty good deal. The access to
>>> other stuff, and the ability to control it from the iPhone? I think
>
>> What I did was to place a laptop dock under the TV that has digital
>> video, SP/DIF, and USB ports. The laptop drops in, connects to a 1TB
>> drive with music and videos, to the TV and audio system, and to a
>> second power brick for the laptop. I could use wired networking too,
>> but the Wi-Fi is sufficient.
>
> Wow - all that just to avoid spending $99 on a box the size of a pack of
> cards? You're making the AppleTV sound better and better.

Yep, a $15 Dell Dock and a $100 1TB drive instead of a $99 box with no
storage at all. If the AppleTV sounds better then I guess you're the
intended customer of it.

BreadWithSpam@fractious.net

"Todd Allcock" <elecconnec@AnoOspamL.com> writes:
> <BreadWithSpam@fractious.net> wrote in message

>> I've been there, and it stinks. $99 to have all my iMedia available
>> over my home network? That's a pretty good deal. The access to
>> other stuff, and the ability to control it from the iPhone? I think
>
> It just might be the "too little too late" thing. Devices that stream
> from your home computer have been around for a couple of years, (like
> the Western Digital WD Live, for example) and many also support
> services like Netflix, Pandora, Rhapsody, VuDu, etc. I'm not knocking

It depends. Those kinds of devices, relative to the potential market,
effectively just don't exist.

The key will be "it just works". That's a huge part of the magic of the
iPod and the iTunes store.

I've got a D-Link DSM-520 that someone just gave to me because he
couldn't get it to work. I spent a little time trying to get it to work
and while I was able to play some music from a USB stick, I could never
get it to pull any media streams off of my desktop Mac. It's still
sitting there in my A/V center, but at this point the main use for the
device is that I can hand the remote to my kid to play with as a toy.

If the AppleTV just works - just like I can stream iTunes from my
desktop machine to my laptop -- it's just there -- they may own this
category pretty quickly. Especially if it can stream off of devices
folks already have in their hands such as iPod Touch and iPhones.

And *good* netflix integration could help a lot. I can access netflix
streaming on my Tivo and it's okay -- but I still have to go to my
computer to manage my queue and it's still kind of slow and clunky. I'm
eager to see how well Apple's pulled this off.

> The new AppleTV is certainly a good deal if you're already entrenched
> in the iTunes ecosystem, but it really doesn't seem versatile enough
> to rope people into the ecosystem that weren't already there. (Though
> the stream from iPhone/control from iPhone stuff is pretty cool!)

It's a pretty big ecosystem - it includes ever iPod Touch and iPhone and
folks have already been buying heaps of media on those devices.

One more thing which I think could be cool would be if the ATV could use
the DVD player on your desktop machine the way folks use them for their
MacBookAir laptops. Potentially one less device altogether in the
living room with the TV.

--
Plain Bread alone for e-mail, thanks. The rest gets trashed.