Apple TV gets 160GB HDD
Oh, and you can access YouTube on it too
Apple, it seems, is hell bent on making this new foray a success and consequently has announced a build-to-order 160GB version - four times the capacity of the existing version that soon-to-be-very-cross customers have forked out for up until now.
Current pricing details put this at around £269 ($399), a mere £70 more than the 40GB model.
The all-new-and-improved Apple TV will also allow users to wirelessly stream videos from YouTube. Apparently "thousands of clips will be available at launch in mid-June...until the full YouTube catalogue is available this Autumn".
The reason for this staggered content and why the full service is not available instantly - according to a number of websites - is that Apple is converting the videos into the H.264 codec. New clips will be automatically converted by YouTube as they are uploaded, but the older videos need converting as well...and as you can imagine, there's a lot of these.
Apple has said, "users can easily navigate through YouTube’s familiar video browsing categories or search for specific videos. The YouTube feature for Apple TV will be available as a free software update in mid-June".
COMMENTS
a few things
1) you really dont want to see such low-res low-rate movies on your fancy TV
2) hack the AppleTV to play quicktime with the swiss army of codecs -Perian
(it then makes AppleTV worthwhile)
3) you can already do this on a Wii (watch youtube and various other formats)
4) in reply to another comment - you can use 'orb' to stream stuff from a PC to watch on your Wii
Get your own content
There are many ways of getting Apple TV Content that's worth watching, TVmax+, for one, allows you to pull programmes from a sky plus or freeview DVR and put them on a harddrive. Why pay Apple for DRM content when, with a little effort, you don't have to.
Cheap and free software allows you to back your DVDs up to your computer and these backups can be easily converted to Apple TV compliant codecs.
Youtube wasn't designed for the living room, watch you've been framed instead, the quality just isn't their, that's content as well not just video quality.
And finally, it doesn't really matter what size the internal harddrive is, this is a streamer with the convience of a Hard Drive for your favorites or for use as a buffer, having another location to store my video/music/photos/etc in addition to my NAS/Computers will just get more confusing.
Only 160 because..
AppleTV uses a laptop drive. AFAIK 200GB is the largest right now. 160GB is plenty, and since you obviously don't have one, I don't think it really matters to you at all.
On your TV?
I totally agree with the comments above. YouTube is designed for the PC and successful due to viral marketing. Watching YouTube content - or searching for it - on my TV is perhaps the biggest waste of my life I can imagine. The quality will be abysmal, the content equally so...
