Howdy anyone have an ATV, and is it any good?

It's awesome. Especially if you have an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or newer Mac that you can use to airplay to your Apple TV.

Its very good, I have 3 (buying on ebay means you can get for 100 US each plus 20 bucks postage) working at home wired from the family computer. But sometimes it drops the connection with the main itunes/network after its been on a long time, cannot figure out why. For using it to buy movies its a questionable solution as the Thai iTunes store is the pits compared to the us store. For watching your own files/downloads its great but could be better (i.e. you cannot locally mange files like with the Wtv, you need to manage them on the computer). I set up a US account and it was good BUT it is bloody expensive and I kept having problems because it links to your itunes store (which I have set to Thailand).

If you are viewing your own movies you really need an addionational application called iFlicks to make it workable IMHO.

Its very good BUT it could be a lot better. If I did not need to pass fiels to more than one room I would go back to my Wtv hub.

The combination Apple TV & iPad works brilliantly for me. Movies get downloaded to my computer and with Airvideo sent to the Apple TV, using the iPad as "remote control"

The Thai iTunes store has a very poor collection, used it only once to watch a movie, works ok.

Just to emphasize how bad the Thai itunes store is - one of their top recommended movies this week is Joe Black. Jeezz I was in short pants when that came out.

If you want to watch US and UK-based services that are not allowed outside of the US or UK, have a look at:

http://tunlr.net/channels/

Just to emphasize how bad the Thai itunes store is - one of their top recommended movies this week is Joe Black. Jeezz I was in short pants when that came out.

Just use the USA Itunes store with vouchers available online or a US credit card.

Its very good, I have 3 (buying on ebay means you can get for 100 US each plus 20 bucks postage) working at home wired from the family computer. But sometimes it drops the connection with the main itunes/network after its been on a long time, cannot figure out why. For using it to buy movies its a questionable solution as the Thai iTunes store is the pits compared to the us store. For watching your own files/downloads its great but could be better (i.e. you cannot locally mange files like with the Wtv, you need to manage them on the computer). I set up a US account and it was good BUT it is bloody expensive and I kept having problems because it links to your itunes store (which I have set to Thailand).

If you are viewing your own movies you really need an addionational application called iFlicks to make it workable IMHO.

Its very good BUT it could be a lot better. If I did not need to pass fiels to more than one room I would go back to my Wtv hub.

I wonder why do you need iFlicks (whatever that is)?

I usually convert any incoming movies with handbrake into 720p or 1080p H.264 (iPad presets) and once that's done I can add the movies to my iTunes and sync them out to iPads and what have you. On my laptop that takes around 20 minutes a movie - one of the few things where I gain something from the quad core i7 as it took several hours on the old Core 2 Duo.

Seen AppleTV locally sold at 3800 baht. The thought of using my iPhone to stream movies from a large library to all the TVs in the house is a good one. I might yet do that.

PS: about handbrake - use HandbrakeBatch. It replaces the ugly mess that is the Handbrake interface with a single window where you can drop files, select two options (presets and delete original on finish) and just does it. Its brilliant.

I still use the Apple TV for airplay and the occasional rental or purchase on the itunes store of tv shows / movies.

I got tired of the whole handbrake thing even tho it does not take too long anymore with the latest processors.

so I added a Popcorn hour A400 which I love to cut out the handbrake conversions and also the full 3D Support. Highly recommend this player although it is not cheap. The ipad app for it is beautiful.

On another note Jessica at epointsdelivered has a sale on itunes vouchers this weekend. At face value or less.

^ prior to HandbrakeBatch and modern processors, Handbrake was indeed a pain.

Now it's easy. You could even set it up to watch the folder and automatically convert all incoming.

A friend of mine went even further and set up a small number of scripts to convert, catalogue, and publish incoming movies... that's if you have a file server computer anyway.

I use Apple TV mirroring my iPad all the time in Australia so I will be bringing them to Thailand soon. From what I can see I need to get some version of SmartDNS onto my router so I can watch UK and Australian programmes. I'll be experimenting with some of those services using their trial versions before I leave Australia so I can work out what works there so it should work here. I've got all the TV apps I need on my iPad - BBC iPlayer, 4OD, all the news services I want, plus ABC iPlayer. My condo has cable Internet - any suggestions on the most effective package?

iFlicks is excellent for people like me who dont really like computers. Drag n drop, all meta data and sleeve jpgs auto added, auto add to itune, and muxs so a conversion is like 1 to 2 minutes. just makes getting the Trrn file sorted easy. Am sure there are many other ways

Great for computer neanderthols like me.

Jailbreak it and add XBMC - from there install Navi-X to enjoy al your favourite sports, movies and live streaming TV from a number of countries.

If you are a little uncertain about jailbreaking, XBMC/Navi-X also work fine on macs & pc's.

Apple TV version 3 still not successfully jail-broken

Why should I jailbreak the Apple TV? What can it do than?

Apple TV has just introduced a new version of their software - 3.5 - that may be of interest to UK expats. You can now get SkY TV UK live

I love my ATV3. works especially great with the iPad/iPhone app.

Any ideas on availability of Apple TV to buy in pattaya?

Any recommendations for a VPN router, my 3BB router is terrible for streaming movies, so i have been wanting to upgrade the router for while. just got the apple TV from Apple store Thailand. And figured if i get a VPN router set up i can access all the decent Apple TV content from UK or USA.

Cheers,