I preordered an Apple TV back in February and it finally arrived last Thursday. I had previously had a Mac Mini in my home theater system to handle Home Theater PC (HTPC) functionality. I realized that surfing the Internet on the big screen wasn’t too practical and I found it much easier to just go over to my laptop and use the Internet there. That only left me with using Front Row on the machine and I thought it seemed a little bit of a waste of machine. The Apple TV had been released and I figured I would be able to free up a machine for other uses and still get all the functionality I needed for streaming movies and music.

The package includes the Apple TV unit, Apple Remote, and power cord. All connection cables must be purchased separately. The Apple TV’s footprint is a little wider and longer than the Mac Mini, but not as tall. The unit is equipped with an Intel processor and a 40GB hard drive. Connection ports include HDMI, component video, optical audio, RCA audio, 10/100 ethernet, USB 2.0, 802.11n networking, and an IR port.

I connected my AppleTV with an HDMI cable and the optical audio cable. While the HDMI sends both video and audio signal, my receiver does not support audio pass through in the HDMI switching, therefore I needed the extra optical cable. I used the XtremeMac cables that was also purchased on the Apple Store online. I had some bad luck since the first HDMI cable was bad. I brought it into my local Apple Store for exchange and the new cable is working just fine. The thing about digital cables that I’ve read around the internet is digital is digital. Either you will get the signal or you won’t. It’s not worth spending a lot of money on a digital cable. At the same time you may find yourself in the same situation as me where you don’t get the signal at all. In any case it might have just been one bad cable and some poor luck on my part. As far as connectivity for the past week I haven’t come across any problems.

Video formats the Apple TV supports include H.264, H.264 protected, and MPEG-4. Audio formats include AAC, protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV. Photo formats include JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG. In translation, if it works on your iPod it most likely works on the Apple TV. The setup is pretty easy and it walks you through a small tutorial for setting things up with your network. I have an 802.11n network, but I never had problems using my Mac Mini which only had 802.11g. I wasn?t too worried about streaming since the 802.11n network should be much faster than 802.11g. The only thing was the first connection of syncing. It is 40GB worth of data, so it did take a long time. People have recommended using an ethernet connection for the first sync.

Overall the interface is really nice. It’s a big improvement over the older Front Row software. They really did a nice job of cleaning up the interface. I had previously used the product at Macworld SF back in January, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise for me. Overall, the unit works and it does the job intended.

The $299 price tag seems suitable. People are willing to pay that much for an iPod and as others have called it, it’s the iPod for your TV. There are already several tutorials around the internet about hacking the software to support more video formats and others showing how to upgrade the hard drive. While I haven’t tried any of these techniques yet, it’s cool to see that a lot of them seem to be working out for people. I think Apple has done a good job with the product and would recommend it to those looking for an easy way to get their iTunes content into their living room.