Plaidophile

So out of boredom and procrastination, I decided to hook up my Apple TV again to see if it was working (I don't know why it would be since the last time I tried it it was unable to boot, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to try). And guess what, it actually does work! So I went ahead and updated it to Take 2, and wow, Take 2 actually is a pretty huge improvement. You no longer have to specify what gets synced over (aside from which photo albums to make visible), as it just automatically syncs stuff, and stuff that doesn't fit just gets streamed. It seems much slicker than before.

Of course, the main reason I even tried it was because it supports AirTunes, and so now I can have the same music playing through my whole apartment (streamed from my G5 to my bedroom and living room).

So, this is pretty cool. I was getting a bit impatient waiting for TiVo to finally release TiVoCast (their thing to allow you to stream arbitrary video to it), and anyway I was very unimpressed with TiVo Desktop (terrible UI from the TiVo side, and it seemed to only want to play a single song rather than doing a continuous playlist). So now I have a better way of watching those podcasts which aren't supported on the iPod Touch. Also, as much as I don't care about the networked movie rental or purchase services, iTunes is at least much better quality than Unbox (and so far the reviews say it's nearly as good as Blu-Ray).

So far the only problem I'm running into is that for some reason, the music information isn't getting streamed, so the TV just shows the currently-playing track as unknown artist/title/album, at position 0:00 of unknown. It's strange that such a simple thing wouldn't be working (though it's possible that it might just not work because it's currently doing its initial sync). Oh well.