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Alternatives to apple tv?
I am giving the apple tv a 4th and 5th look again.
What is selling me on the ATV:
Meant for itunes, I have my whole music collection on there for my ipod
supports "Sound Check" for volume leveling.
displays cover art for music.
And the BIGGEST reason of all: It has a hard drive. Throw all of those Streamers out the window. I don't want to leave my pc on 24/7. ATV streams and stores it so I can turn the PC off, and never have to update my thumb drives to play music in my xbox 360.
Are there any other devices that are comparable?
Does anyone know if you can shuffle songs within an Artist?
And what's with this "Does not turn off" problem? Is the Hard Drive spinning 24/7?
Thanks a bunch!
What is selling me on the ATV:
Meant for itunes, I have my whole music collection on there for my ipod
supports "Sound Check" for volume leveling.
displays cover art for music.
And the BIGGEST reason of all: It has a hard drive. Throw all of those Streamers out the window. I don't want to leave my pc on 24/7. ATV streams and stores it so I can turn the PC off, and never have to update my thumb drives to play music in my xbox 360.
Are there any other devices that are comparable?
Does anyone know if you can shuffle songs within an Artist?
And what's with this "Does not turn off" problem? Is the Hard Drive spinning 24/7?
Thanks a bunch!
1 - 7 of 7 Posts
Since you make mention of "...not want to leave my pc on 24/7" to act as the server, I would suggest you consider looking into a NAS device, like the readyNAS systems by Netgear.
I'm not affiliated with Netgear, I'm just an owner/user of a readyNAS Duo, and am an adoring fan of it!! The beauty of this device is that while it primarily acts as a backup/storage device on your home network, with the ability to go get and make a backup of whichever folders/files you want it to periodically, it has a lot of add on features which allow it to serve up music/pictures/video to other devices out on the network, thereby allowing you to turn that pc off! It has an itunes compatable service which allows you to keep your itunes music library on it rather than on your pc. It also now has dlna service, which more and more tv's and other devices are incorporating to listen to music and/or serve up slide shows on your tv's around your house, or outside of your house via the internet.
What I'm now looking for, and what is sort of the holy grail for me, is to find an end-player device that can act apple tv like in that it can serve up a slide show while playing music at the same time. That is a great feature of apple tv, but apple tv doesn't have all of the other benefits that the NAS does, so I'm not interested in adding apple tv.
Anyone have any thoughts on that? I've been browsing through dlna compliant devices, and haven't yet found what I'm looking for, but I'm sure it is either out there now or it will be out there soon enough.
I'm not affiliated with Netgear, I'm just an owner/user of a readyNAS Duo, and am an adoring fan of it!! The beauty of this device is that while it primarily acts as a backup/storage device on your home network, with the ability to go get and make a backup of whichever folders/files you want it to periodically, it has a lot of add on features which allow it to serve up music/pictures/video to other devices out on the network, thereby allowing you to turn that pc off! It has an itunes compatable service which allows you to keep your itunes music library on it rather than on your pc. It also now has dlna service, which more and more tv's and other devices are incorporating to listen to music and/or serve up slide shows on your tv's around your house, or outside of your house via the internet.
What I'm now looking for, and what is sort of the holy grail for me, is to find an end-player device that can act apple tv like in that it can serve up a slide show while playing music at the same time. That is a great feature of apple tv, but apple tv doesn't have all of the other benefits that the NAS does, so I'm not interested in adding apple tv.
Anyone have any thoughts on that? I've been browsing through dlna compliant devices, and haven't yet found what I'm looking for, but I'm sure it is either out there now or it will be out there soon enough.
There are lots of devices out there that do these things.... one thing to consider, if you copy music to the ATV so you can turn your PC off then you need to keep and maintain 2 copies of your music library. It wastes space but more importantly itunes apple provides no easy way to keep them in sync....
XBMC does all this and more including playing songs native from itunes. One thing to consider is that only an Apple player will play DRM protected songs from the itunes store.
Whats the big hold up? The device cost $250 just buy one... take it back if you dont like....
Sean
Quote:
Originally Posted by templetun /forum/post/16875822
I am giving the apple tv a 4th and 5th look again.
What is selling me on the ATV:
Meant for itunes, I have my whole music collection on there for my ipod
supports "Sound Check" for volume leveling.
displays cover art for music.
And the BIGGEST reason of all: It has a hard drive. Throw all of those Streamers out the window. I don't want to leave my pc on 24/7. ATV streams and stores it so I can turn the PC off, and never have to update my thumb drives to play music in my xbox 360.
Are there any other devices that are comparable?
Does anyone know if you can shuffle songs within an Artist?
And what's with this "Does not turn off" problem? Is the Hard Drive spinning 24/7?
Thanks a bunch!
There are lots of devices out there that do these things.... one thing to consider, if you copy music to the ATV so you can turn your PC off then you need to keep and maintain 2 copies of your music library. It wastes space but more importantly itunes apple provides no easy way to keep them in sync....
XBMC does all this and more including playing songs native from itunes. One thing to consider is that only an Apple player will play DRM protected songs from the itunes store.
Whats the big hold up? The device cost $250 just buy one... take it back if you dont like....
Sean
If you like the Duo and the support from Netgear on their forums, take a look at the Netgear EVA 9150. It will do everything you want with a minimum of fuss. It's not quite Apple quality in terms of interface, but it's very good and quite responsive. Furthermore it will handle 1080p which the Apple can't handle. I've only had mine for a couple of months, but we use it a lot, especially with Hulu and Netflix via PlayOn. The only downside is that it is expensive relative to some of the other alternatives.
Alan
Alan
I have an Apple TV and a Mac Mini (2009) attached to my HDTV. I also have an Mvix Ultio which would be a possible alternative. It's also attached to the same HDTV as the other devices ( for comparing). All of this lives on a gigabit network with a D-Link NAS. There's also an Airport Extreme N wireless with a Drobo. So there are plenty of ways to stream or not.
The Apple TV fits in great with the iTunes world. It does not have an on/off physical switch. You put it into standy (basically off) via the remote and it's really handy as it "wakes up" instantly. The unit is totally silent which is something that most other media players are not.
It will play within artist, etc...
It is extremely easy to modify without opening the case and you can put xbmc, software menu and nitoTV on it without knowing much. The reason you may want to do that is to play those files which are not in iTunes form. So you may have a dvix file or whatever. It will play all those and it does it really well (even without xbmc). What it will not do is handle 720p files well that are not made for itunes ( so mainly mkv files from wherever they come). But the 720p .m4v files play great and the picture is extremely nice on my system anyway (a 52" HDTV).
I think that the iPod family, of which the AppleTV is a member, is going to evolve nicely and Apple is going to be around to see it through. That's not to say something won't replace the AppleTV.
Once you move to products like the Popcorn Hour (and it's recent upgrade), Mvix Ultio, etc...you are entering the wild, wild west where there are codecs all over the map. The Ultio will play anything I can throw at it, but it's nowhere near as elegant as the Apple TV. It really is nice but it will not fit in as nicely with the iTunes world you appear to be in. But the Ultio (and NMT type products like the Popcorn hour) will stream and they have room for a hard drive. They will play anything, but won't of course be able to handle iTunes type drm files.
The Ultio is inexpensive and good for someone with a variety of files. I really like it, though it's network management is nowhere near the level of the AppleTV. I guess the Xtreamer is similar. Perhaps the new Popcorn device will be better but it seems to me that paying over $300 or so for a media player leads me to ask why not just go with a Mac Mini or a PC Media computer of sorts.
If you want to play lot's of 720p+ files that are not iTunes purchases then the Apple TV is not for you. Otherwise, it's a great little system. Apple is bound to upgrade it soon enough. At the moment it uses an IDE drive. Unless there's a pressing need I'd wait. It's pretty darned nice though. If you do go for it get a refurbished 160gig one.
The installation of a hard drive in the Ultio is trivial. The noise level jumps though to an intolerable level for me. I've read simiar comments about the Xtreamer fan. I don't know about the new player from Popcorn (in terms of noise).
Anyway: Popcorn, Ultio, Xtreamer, etc...all have hard drives or you can add them.
pmcd
Quote:
Originally Posted by templetun /forum/post/16875822
I am giving the apple tv a 4th and 5th look again.
What is selling me on the ATV:
Meant for itunes, I have my whole music collection on there for my ipod
supports "Sound Check" for volume leveling.
displays cover art for music.
And the BIGGEST reason of all: It has a hard drive. Throw all of those Streamers out the window. I don't want to leave my pc on 24/7. ATV streams and stores it so I can turn the PC off, and never have to update my thumb drives to play music in my xbox 360.
Are there any other devices that are comparable?
Does anyone know if you can shuffle songs within an Artist?
And what's with this "Does not turn off" problem? Is the Hard Drive spinning 24/7?
Thanks a bunch!
I have an Apple TV and a Mac Mini (2009) attached to my HDTV. I also have an Mvix Ultio which would be a possible alternative. It's also attached to the same HDTV as the other devices ( for comparing). All of this lives on a gigabit network with a D-Link NAS. There's also an Airport Extreme N wireless with a Drobo. So there are plenty of ways to stream or not.
The Apple TV fits in great with the iTunes world. It does not have an on/off physical switch. You put it into standy (basically off) via the remote and it's really handy as it "wakes up" instantly. The unit is totally silent which is something that most other media players are not.
It will play within artist, etc...
It is extremely easy to modify without opening the case and you can put xbmc, software menu and nitoTV on it without knowing much. The reason you may want to do that is to play those files which are not in iTunes form. So you may have a dvix file or whatever. It will play all those and it does it really well (even without xbmc). What it will not do is handle 720p files well that are not made for itunes ( so mainly mkv files from wherever they come). But the 720p .m4v files play great and the picture is extremely nice on my system anyway (a 52" HDTV).
I think that the iPod family, of which the AppleTV is a member, is going to evolve nicely and Apple is going to be around to see it through. That's not to say something won't replace the AppleTV.
Once you move to products like the Popcorn Hour (and it's recent upgrade), Mvix Ultio, etc...you are entering the wild, wild west where there are codecs all over the map. The Ultio will play anything I can throw at it, but it's nowhere near as elegant as the Apple TV. It really is nice but it will not fit in as nicely with the iTunes world you appear to be in. But the Ultio (and NMT type products like the Popcorn hour) will stream and they have room for a hard drive. They will play anything, but won't of course be able to handle iTunes type drm files.
The Ultio is inexpensive and good for someone with a variety of files. I really like it, though it's network management is nowhere near the level of the AppleTV. I guess the Xtreamer is similar. Perhaps the new Popcorn device will be better but it seems to me that paying over $300 or so for a media player leads me to ask why not just go with a Mac Mini or a PC Media computer of sorts.
If you want to play lot's of 720p+ files that are not iTunes purchases then the Apple TV is not for you. Otherwise, it's a great little system. Apple is bound to upgrade it soon enough. At the moment it uses an IDE drive. Unless there's a pressing need I'd wait. It's pretty darned nice though. If you do go for it get a refurbished 160gig one.
The installation of a hard drive in the Ultio is trivial. The noise level jumps though to an intolerable level for me. I've read simiar comments about the Xtreamer fan. I don't know about the new player from Popcorn (in terms of noise).
Anyway: Popcorn, Ultio, Xtreamer, etc...all have hard drives or you can add them.
pmcd
Thanks for the replies guys. I checked out the popcorn hour, and the wdtv as well. I even though of putting together a HTPC for this, and have used xbmc, and vista media center. But none of them have the ability to stream and save. I'm not a big fan of NAS systems because my l tap into my landlords internet and do not have control over their router.
I should have mentioned, If I didn't have to use iTunes I wouldn't, but it seems to be the easiest to manage mp3's for my ipod. I do not own any drm restricted music nor AAC format. I use Winlame to rip and MediaMonkey to manage. The xbox works fine to play music from 2 16 gig thumb drives but it lacks album art, and does not save playlists, and will take a while to read if I hit "Play all".
have you purchased a refurbished 160 atv? It just seems a bit pricey. I can build a whole pc for the price of an atv.
Oh, and to mention, this would be for music only, I don't have any interest in using the atv for movies.
I should have mentioned, If I didn't have to use iTunes I wouldn't, but it seems to be the easiest to manage mp3's for my ipod. I do not own any drm restricted music nor AAC format. I use Winlame to rip and MediaMonkey to manage. The xbox works fine to play music from 2 16 gig thumb drives but it lacks album art, and does not save playlists, and will take a while to read if I hit "Play all".
have you purchased a refurbished 160 atv? It just seems a bit pricey. I can build a whole pc for the price of an atv.
Oh, and to mention, this would be for music only, I don't have any interest in using the atv for movies.
1 - 7 of 7 Posts
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