Apple TV 2 Review

Today I picked up an Apple TV. The setup was simple just plug in the power cord and then connect an HDMI cable from the Apple TV to a HD monitor. You do have to buy the HDMI cable separately. At that point you either have to connect an Ethernet cable to hard wire it, or connect it to your wireless network. If you have a network password like mine this can be tedious using the remote that comes with the Apple TV, thank goodness you only have to do it once. The next thing I did was turn on home sharing, so I can watch movies that are on my network thru my Apple TV. This reminded me that I do have some videos that need to be convert to the correct format. I will probably use Handbrake to do that. I also need to go back and enter better metadata, I am getting unknown video a lot.

One of the reasons I picked up an Apple Tv was to use AirPlay with it and my iPad (version 1) and iPhone 4. It worked perfectly with the iPad, I love having the ability to send videos from my iPad and then watch them on a big screen. However, I work on my iPad a lot, so I wanted to make sure the iPhone also worked with AirPlay. At first I tried using AirPlay with Showyou a video application I had on my iPhone and it didn’t work. I thought maybe it didn’t work thru Showyou, so I tried it thru the YouTube and it still wasn’t working. In fact I wasn’t even seeing the AirPlay icon at all. I double checked and they were both on the same network, which I knew could be a problem. I finally found the answer on the Apple Forum, I power the iPhone down completely and then restarted it and then AirPlay worked.

So far after using the Apple TV for only a couple of hours I really like it and am glad I purchased it. I did have the original Apple TV and I jail broke it and now I am deciding if I want to jailbreak this one. If you have a jail broken Apple TV 2, I would like to know why you did it, did you run into any problems doing it and do you like the results.