With Apple TV, Apple tries to enter the home media center market. Will it be enough for me?

Apple TV. I had one, but not anymore. I got rid of it. It is a nice little piece of hardware though, and a good extension to your existing iTunes library. If you have all your media in iTunes you cant get wrong with it. It is the perfect companion.

But it is too tied to iTunes, that is why some Apple TV hacks have surfaced. Because people want to control what they want to play, not the other way around where Apple controls what you are allowed to play.

Even if I use Mac none of my movies are stored in the iTunes library. If I am going to place the media there I have to re - encode the files so it can be played by iTunes and in turn, played by this little box... For me this is a limitation. I want to put any kind of media on the box and it should just play, and not have to worry about re - encoding files. Also, I cant store all of my movies in the iTunes library. The 320GB hard drive in the laptop is not that big if we talk about HD material ...

I did re encode files for a while and watched them, it works just fine really but it is a bit tedious having to do that every time, even if there is software available doing this for you in a easy way. Like VisualHub (now discontinued I am sorry to report). I noticed it was possible to install some Apple TV hacks. With this hack I could actually play those video files I couldn't play before. I could install codecs wich enabled play of other formats originally not supported by the unit.

Now it could play almost anything, the only limitation was resolutions above 720P. It might have been the software being in its early stages when I tried or I think the hardware just could not cope with the media. What is interesting for me is to play HD material.

Do not get me wrong though, if you use iTunes as your main media hub this box is really good for you. And easy to use, you also get the remote. If you have media files outside iTunes I cant really recommend it if you dont want to re encode your files or hack the box.