1FPS|by David Chartier

I’m in the basement about to shut down the Mac Pro that houses our entire iTunes library. Jessi is upstairs using the Apple TV to stream an album from the Mac Pro. So I don’t interrupt her music or grading, I put the album on a playlist in iTunes, synced the playlist to the Apple TV (while it was still streaming), then shut down the Mac Pro so I could swap out a hard drive (remember how much I love playing inside our Mac Pro?). The Apple TV, to my surprise, kept playing straight through the album without skipping a beat.

Jessi never knew or had to be bothered by the fact that I cut off the stream. The Apple TV just switched to the local copies of the songs I synced up and kept on playing.

Smart.

Jacqui Cheng, one of my editors, on an NBC exec speaking about qualms with iTunes Store distribution:

That’s right: NBC would like to dump its contents back onto iTunes, ask you for at least $2 (or more) per episode, and then have Apple place extremely tight restrictions on if and how it can be played on an iPod or iPhone. Without the ability to take it with you offline—like, say, when you’re riding the train to work, or flying across the country—there isn’t a lot of difference between buying a show on iTunes and watching it for free on Hulu. And perhaps that’s the point.

Considering that we can finally take video content off our computers conveniently (and securely, for better and worse) with great gadgets like the iPhone and Apple TV, part of me thinks Jacqui’s headline could simply have been “NBC exec: ‘I am high as a kite.’”

802.11n is a fairly reliable way to stream content to an Apple TV, especially if you can go 802.11n-only to prevent non-N devices from dragging down the network. WiFi, however, is still susceptible to quirks, and it appears that the iTunes <–> Apple TV wireless handshake is too. We switched to 802.11n-only a few weeks ago in an attempt to improve our 40GB Apple TV’s ability to stay connected to our 250+GB iTunes library (over 210GB of which is video), and it’s worked pretty well. That said, we still run into the occasional-but-frustrating library ejection, sometimes right in the middle of a show. I suspect these dropouts may be the cause of wireless interference due to the materials used to build the townhome we rent, or perhaps our close proximity to other people’s wireless networks and devices. Even if I’m right, though, it doesn’t help our predicament.

I want to be able to store and sync our entire library with the Apple TV so we don’t have to deal with these annoyances. A cheap hard drive would solve this problem perfectly, and it would give us peace of mind to keep purchasing content from the iTunes Store without having to worry as to whether we can watch it in our now cable-less living room.

No, a Mac mini is not an option. The Apple TV, when we got one, cost $300. Now they’re $229 for the base model we have. Mac minis start at $600. For those not paying attention, a Mac mini is more than twice the price of an Apple TV. A price which isn’t worth it to solve what should be a minor problem. Plus, the Apple TV’s new Take 2 UI and features finally pulled ahead of Front Row. Fundamentally, the device is designed for a TV. Front Row and the Mac OS X environment are not.

The kicker is that the Apple TV actually has a USB port that is more or less handicapped to the general consumer. Apple says it’s for doing maintenance and troubleshooting when the time comes. Yea you can hack your Apple TV to do tons of wild stuff, and there’s even a hack for using external hard drives, but that only works on a previous 1.x version of the Apple TV software. Plus, it’s an ugly hack, and the Apple TV Take 2 software is just too darn great.

So what’s a frustrated Apple TV owner with a growing iTunes Store-purchased video and podcast library to do? Why, submit feedback via Apple’s official Apple TV feedback page, of course. If you’re in the same predicament, I urge you to send your own thoughts to Apple as well. For the record, here’s what I sent:

Please allow us to plug in our own USB hard drives to expand the Apple TV’s storage. There’s a USB port on the back of the device that is otherwise unusable. This really is pretty silly, and there isn’t much of a legitimate reason for Apple to keep this functionality locked away. Are you worried we’ll start plugging in hard drives and swapping content? For the users who want to do that (I don’t; check my iTunes Store purchase records), there are far smaller, capacious, and easily accessible devices for doing that called “iPods.”

WiFi—even 802.11n—is not a great solution for streaming content from our increasingly expanding iTunes libraries. Neither is drilling holes through our walls to run ethernet cable. If you want us to keep buying content from the iTunes Store (especially space-hogging video) and enjoying said content on our living room TVs, we need the ability to expand our Apple TV storage by plugging in an extra hard drive.

At least it couldn’t hurt, right? Go submit some feedback, see if it’ll help.

I haven’t tested this out yet, but it sounds like a clever solution:

Purre is a program that makes shortcuts in the Movie folder that links to iPhoto library and allows you to play iPhoto movies in Front Row.

Right now, iPhoto ‘08 will import movies shot with a digital camera, but that’s about as far as it goes. There’s no easy way to get these movies into iTunes (or convert them, as I believe many cameras still don’t shoot in QuickTime-friendly formats), and both Front Row and the Apple TV all but ignore them.

Purre is donationware from Drunkcheese.com.