We’ve had Apple TV “Take Two” installed for about a week now.
Generally speaking it is a great upgrade. It took a few minutes for me to figure out that they have dynamically merged locally synched content with the shared iTunes library (so if you have iTunes running the movies or whatever are dynamically merged into the menus). This is really quite slick.
The ability to directly access movies, tv shows, and especially podcasts is also pretty good. I haven’t rented a movie yet, but we’ll definitely give that a try one of these days.
The ability to access .Mac galleries is wicked cool. I haven’t tried Flickr yet, but I can see how that would be a great feature.
However, I’ve noticed a few changes that aren’t positive, and lately I’ve run into some downright issues.
Apparently some of those nice dynamic features come at a cost (which is almost certainly a software bug rather than a real cost). The UI is extremely “jittery”: freezing up at various points. I checked the Apple user forums and I am not alone. One hypothesis is that dynamic iTunes merging may be the source of the problem and they seem to be correct.
So, for now, we don’t have access to our movie library on the home server — annoying but we use Apple TV mostly for watching podcasts and our music (both sets are synched).
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