By right things, you mean uninformed drivel and half-truth? How about you try to find counter-arguments to my reply instead of just attacking me as an “Apple Zealot” and bragging about your possessions?

“Hmm, I wonder if that Apple Zealot’s precious Apple TV box will interface with my 5 Linux PC’s and 7TB of movies and TV shows in various formats? Hmm, will that .ogm and .mkv play on the Apple TV box?”

For the “various format” support, you can install the open-source Perian plug-in in the Apple TV, as it’s easily hackable. The Apple TV is a UNIX box, people can add support for just about anything just like you can do with Linux.

.mkv and .ogm support in Perian is currently being added, but for now it supports many popular formats like:

AVI and FLV
3ivX, DivX, Flash Screen Video, MS-MPEG4, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, and Xvid
AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio using A52Codec.

Also, people already managed to run VLC on the ATV.

For interfacing the Apple TV with a Linux PC the official way, you’ll have to run iTunes with WINE, but just like there are tons of third party programs to transfer songs and videos to the iPod, the same will probably happen for the ATV. Heck, you could just run VLC on the ATV and browse your linux machine on the network and it should work…

“I think I will stick with my networked PC that sits next to my 42″ widescreen TV and is connect via DVI cable with a wireless mouse and keyboard next to my Lazyboy. How do you think i am typing this.”

Cool for you dude, but the majority of people don’t want to control a TV with a keyboard and mouse. And tell me where you can find a very small, nearly silent linux PC with HDMI and component output for $300.

I like how you’re ridiculing the ATV by calling it “precious” while bragging about your 7TB of media, 5 PCs and 42″ TV. Who looks greedy and self-important? You my friend…

It’s not a “rent box”, you don’t rent movies music and TV shows, you buy them, meaning they are yours and won’t self-destruct at a specific time.

“The company confidently predicts you’ll pay $300 for the box and then further non-stop increments of $10 and up to buy a very limited selection of movies you could otherwise have rented from your local video stores for a couple of dollars, and without download hassles.”

First, you forgot to mention $2 TV shows, probably because they’re cheap and the selection is very good. Obviously your goal is to dismiss Apple by only mentioning movies. The iTunes movie service only recently been released, and the selection will increase just like it did for TV shows. Also, there’s plenty of free content like video podcasts that can play on the Apple TV.

And what “download hassles” are you talking about? Downloading movies and shows on iTunes is easy as pie, and is relatively quick. Maybe you’re used to the Xbox 360 HD movie downloading problems, or maybe p2p movie downloading hassles?

To me, it’s much less of a hassle to download a movie from iTunes than to have to drive to the video-store. And BTW in case you didn’t know, you can start watching iTunes movies a few minutes after they started to download, you don’t have to wait until it’s finished.

“Examples? “In addition to its game-playing features, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 ($400) performs a similar PC-to-TV bridging function; in fact, it even has its own online movie store. Netgear’s week-old EVA8000 ($350) also joins PC and TV, but adds an Internet connection for viewing YouTube videos and listening to Internet radio.”

To name just a couple.”

What a surprise you forgot to point out the problems with these two devices that were listed in the same article. First, to have wireless on the Xbox, you need to add $100 to the price, bringing the price of the box to $500. Sure it plays games, but many people don’t care at all about this part. The 360 is much bigger and much noisier, it doesn’t fit well in most people’s livingrooms. Setup is complicated, and you’ll have to buy a complicated remote if you don’t want to use the game controllers. Most people don’t want that.

The Netgear box has a crappy interface and is relatively hard to setup for the average joe. The Apple TV also can connect to the internet to stream movies, and since Google is on the Apple board you can bet it’ll eventually have the best YouTube support of any box. Internet Radio is dying, pocasting is where it’s at. Apple TV has by far the best podcast support.

“Moreover, you have to have a widescreen TV, preferably an HDTV, because, “It doesn’t work with the squarish, traditional TVs that many people still have,” says the NYT. Many? Most.

Nor does Apple supply the cabkles you’ll need to plug in into your expensive new TV set. You buy the HDMI, component video or HDMI-to-DVI adapter —— from Apple at $20.”

I suggest proof-reading your articles before posting. You’re right that no support for older TV is bad, but $20 for a HDMI “cabkles” is a good price. They should’ve included a component cable I agree, but then people with HDMI would have a useless extra cable.

“So you’re all set to start recording those $20 movies it’s taken you hours to download.

Not.

Apple TV doesn’t record.”

What the heck is this supposed to mean?? Why would you need to record a movie you downloaded? If it’s downloaded, you own it, it’s ready to play, and you can make backups if you want. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.

What $20 movies are you talking about? New releases are $15 on iTunes, and older movies are $10 like you stated yourself. And like I said you can watch them before they finished downloading.