AppleTV?

I'm considering grabbing an AppleTV if I can get one cheap enough (~$100) to play around with and stream content to the big TV, with the eventual goal of weaning the Wife off of big cable - I think if I buy everything she watches through itunes it'd still be cheaper than my monthly cable bill. I would of course have to set it up with Boxee as well. Has anyone here had hands-on experience with an AppleTV? Good idea or waste of time and money?

I was going to do this until everything I read about AppleTV+Boxee said it was so slow and buggy that you'd end up destroying it with a 7-iron in a fit of rage after the 43rd time your Netflix stream froze.

What is AppleTV?

I'd go with another product rather than AppleTV. It really isn't a good platform as they don't really give it the attention it needs to work well.

Alternatives exist however:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/popbox-v1-0-hardware-specs-and-content-partners-revealed/

http://gizmodo.com/tag/hdmediaplayers/

http://www.engadget.com/tag/MediaStreamer/

Personally, a decent ITX machine with the appropriate hardware and Windows 7 Media Center works just fine, but then I'm cheap and like to geek out with stuff. The trick would be getting iTunes installed and configured to work with a Media Center remote (which is all AppleTV is, a front end for iTunes, plus some other software added to allow API calls into other solutions)

Josh wrote: I was going to do this until everything I read about AppleTV+Boxee said it was so slow and buggy that you'd end up destroying it with a 7-iron in a fit of rage after the 43rd time your Netflix stream froze.

Unpossible. Apple stuff "just works". Duh.

I got one for christmas, so I've only started to play with it.

Out of the box, it's very good at what it does, but what it does is limited. You can very easily 1) store movies 2) buy/rent movies from ITMS. It's FAST. Time from purchase to viewing was less than 30 seconds for me. 3) Connect to your PC via WiFi and play your tunes, show your photos, etc 4) play youtube videos.

Plus there's some other stuff. All of that is easy to use and works beautifully.

Boxee is a simplified layer on top of XBMC, as I understand it. Either (both) makes the ATV more of a traditional media center, allowing you to tap into all sorts of media sources, legit and otherwise. I've installed them, but haven't played with either much. Boxee, to me, seems like a waste of time so far, since XBMC seems pretty nice all by itself.

Notes: 1) if you're looking at $100 ATVs, they're probably the older 40gig version. Budget for ripping out the puny drive and putting in something bigger. 2) if it has the latest (3.01) software, installing XBMC/Boxee is a bit trickier. If it has older (pre 3.0) software, it's easier. I imagine the XBMC hackers will update their installer soon.

DILYSI Dave wrote: Unpossible. Apple stuff "just works". Duh.

Well, actually, it does. Until you hack it to run software it was never intended to run.