This is mostly due to the Xbox heritage of XBMC which Boxee is based off. It sits in a tight loop constantly updating the screen even when nothing has changed. If you have Boxee running on something like a Mac mini, you'll hear the fans go into overdrive whenever the GUI is up as the CPU is pegged at nearly 100% usage. It drops a bit when it is actually playing something but it is still higher than it should be.

Changing it to reduce the high CPU usage has appeared as a feature request several times but each time it gets shot down as it would involve a major rewrite of the core which nobody is willing to do.


This is Apple we're talking about here so that is highly unlikely...

Would it really kill Apple to support FLAC

Perhaps not -- but would it really kill Apple to afford those who don't (literally) buy in to the all-Apple ecosystem, the benefits afforded to those who do? Actually quite possibly, yes.

Peter

I was thinking more about it today, and quite frankly there was quite a bit Apple didn't say about the AppleTV. If I'm left to assume, as I am, then I assume that the new AppleTV will behave exactly like the old TV when connecting to a secondary iTunes library. The primary library can sync with the old AppleTV, but while you can add additional libraries, those computers have to be on and iTunes running in order for the AppleTV to see them.

While this might not be a problem for us geeks, who probably always have our computers turned on, this will most certainly be a problem for people like my mom, who uses her AppleTV almost exclusively as a device to play music and slideshows, and usually has her computer turned off. Steve talked about how people don't want to sync with their computers, implying that the new way will be simpler. To me, this only adds to the complication of the device for users like my mom.

This new Apple TV will be a lot more straight forward IMO. While the computer needs to be ON, that much should be obvious to most people, in the same way that your CD player has to be ON to play music through your Amplifier which is also ON. Or that your car has to be ON to use the stereo in it. Etc...

I believe the process of syncing a portion of your collection to another device is a lot more foreign a concept.

Also, for any AppleTV owners who use a Mac and an Apple Airport, Wake on Demand, will allow people to keep their machines asleep most of the time, and the AppleTV will just wake it when needed. This is how the older one works too. If I play a show locally, works as expected. If I want to play a show only on my computer, I'll hear my system wake from sleep when I'm browsing the menus to select it.

I believe Bonjour 2.0 also added Wake on Demand to Windows, so as long as the machine supports the normal Wake on LAN and the network is hosted by an Airport, it should work. I'll try to do some testing later of this. Bonjour 2.0 is inside the print services, downloadable here.

Oh, anyone interested in the old AppleTV with hard drive, it's on clearance for $149.

It does Apple Lossless so yup. MP3 got by because of the wide support by everybody else.

Sorry, but those are terrible analogies.

Most people don't have their computers even in the same room as their home theater, first of all, so your average consumer tends to not make that connection. Second, it's not just that the computer has to be on, but iTunes also has to be open, or it doesn't work.

Trust me, I know this will confuse people. Why? Because my mother is more tech savvy than nearly all the people I support, and I've still had a great deal of difficulty getting her to understand that she can stream content from her computer if it's turned on with iTunes opened. See, she has the first AppleTV, which had a measly 40GB of space. Once you get an average amount of music and photos on there, you're left with little room for video, but she could still stream what isn't synced.

This isn't like "oh, I forgot to turn on my receiver, that's why there's no sound." In my mom's case, it's "damn, I forgot to turn on my computer, wait five minutes for it to boot, then launch iTunes. Now I have to walk up three floors to do that and come back down."


Seriously? You mean, the way every single one of those 250 million iOS devices that Steve was so proud of has been used since the very first iPod? I think people understand syncing.

What I'm hoping is that Apple simply wasn't ready to announce what they're going to do with Lala, and that the idea is that at some point the AppleTV will already know what content you own, and can simply organize it and stream it for you. Perhaps this is also part of their new datacenter plans. If that were the case, I would be far more enthusiastic about the new product.

As it is, it's hard for me to see this as anything but a product that's less then its predecessor. I just don't see anything better about this device.

Steve mentioned what was better. Namely, the price and the size.

You're putting too much thought into it. Streaming, from a computer, is how pretty much every single other media device out there works now.

With the AppleTV the main focus is on SALES. So you'll always see the rental options come up first. Just be glad this thing streams from a local network at all.

MP3 used to be the only thing supported by iTunes. iTunes is based on SoundJam, which Apple acquired, and there was nothing else to support at the time. AAC only came about with the music store as I recall.

True, all true. And I can't say they didn't accomplish what they needed to when it comes to the price, which is sort of the ideal price for consumer gadgets.

FWIW, and IIRC, Wake on WiFi only works on MacBooks starting with the Unibody MacBooks. And it's apparently a hardware issue, as they've pretty much stated outright that the prior MacBooks won't get it. I don't know about desktop Macs, but those are far more likely to be wired. And, yes, streaming from WiFi to WiFi is not ideal, but it's probably also not uncommon.

Do any non-Apple home routers support this yet? I really like the idea of what Apple has done, but this sort of things really should be a standard. (Or, heaven forbid that the AppleTV could remember, by itself, that it once saw an iTunes library at a given MAC address.)

You know what pisses me off about some of these Apple events or announcements? When an OLD feature is highlighted as something new.

The ability to show album art on the left in iTunes and sort the list by artist and then sub-sort by some album criteria (alphabetical or year) has been in iTunes since version 7. It's the single feature that actually made iTunes worth anything at all for looking at more than a dozen track collection.

The new twist on this feature is that by enabling it the way Steve showed, it will only show the artwork if there are at least 5 tracks from the album. Personally, I think that's a load of rubbish and just prefer to always show the artwork like that. Because now it's impossible to see the artwork for singles and other "abums" with only 4 or fewer tracks. You suck Apple.

You have been able to get to this feature in different ways, most recently by checking the "artwork" option in the View preferences to show album art on the left, and then clicking the ALBUM header which cycles through "Album by Year," "Album by Artist" and just plain "Album." It used to be much simpler than this as there was an arrow on the left of the header that simply allowed you to toggle the artwork on/off.

WIth iTunes 10 the artwork view comes automatically with a new view mode. Which is easier to see than setting the view options, but a bit redundant, IMO. It's even less interesting and useful than it used to be for a number of reasons:

-The artwork on the side is small and it doesn't resize when you change its column width. You can now pick "small" which is ultra-small, "medium" which is the default, and "large" which is scarcely bigger than medium. Kind of sucks on a high res screen.
-The name of the album appears to the RIGHT of the album artwork, which means that instead of possibly wasting vertical space, now you're wasting a shitload of horizontal space if you ever hope to read your album name - it creates a ton of empty white space which looks very bad.

What Apple did to make sure people use this new mode? The removed the "artwork" option from the View menu so now you can't do it the old (better) way.

And what about the OTHER possibly redundant information? Album year and genre for instance? Maybe it would have been nice to include the title UNDER the album artwork along with the name of the band and the year of the album. Genre can change between songs for those anal enough to set them that way, so don't bother to include that there.

Good job Apple. You guys can't design squat anymore. It amazes me that they can still keep ahead of everyone else. That says a lot. Everyone else sucks much much worse.

The current IETF draft (still a work in progress disclaimer), is called Sleep Proxy Service, an extension of mDNS (aka Bonjour). Source code is here, but as far as I know, no other router has grabbed any of it. Might be able to get it to work against one of the open source firmware projects like OpenWRT. Looks like they have a feature request for it already, but no work has been done.

As for Wake on Demand and WiFi, there wasn't a good clear cutoff on what models support it and what don't, as Apple has sometimes swapped out WiFi boards midmodel. The best way to check is referenced in the KB article I linked earlier. Basically check System Profile under Airport for "Wake On Wireless: Supported" Also, there is notes in the article regarding how to get Wake on Demand to work if the laptop lid is closed. Kinda a PITA currently, as it involves waking the system once after closing the lid.

So are streaming boxen really a migration scheme. Get everyone used to streaming content to the TV, then eventually no support for streaming from anywhere but the mothership?

Glenn, I'm sure if Apple could have made the Apple TV sound as promising without local streaming, they would have.

However, even its local streaming is primarily intended to stream video which you've purchased from the iTunes store. The formats supported don't really lend themselves to much more. I suppose some people may transcode their rips in the same way, but most people seem to now lean toward Matroska, with some old-school hold-outs still likely using avi. I use Handbrake, which does have the capability to support an mp4 container, but I still choose Matroska so have access to the Matroska tools and being able to include chapters, all the language tracks and subtitle tracks.

Here's another random question: what's the difference between the new "AirPlay" and the old tried and true "AirTunes"? So far as I can tell, both are designed to let you stream your possibly-protected music to another device. I'm assuming that AirPlay = AirTunes + support for video streaming, and is thus backward compatible, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out I was wrong.

(And, when I'm streaming iTune Store-purchased video from my existing iTunes on my computer to my existing AppleTV, aren't I already doing what AirPlay is all about?)

AirTunes is renamed to AirPlay, and adds video and photos. It's still a push setup that will also allow pushing that content off an iOS 4.1 device to the Apple TV. And yes, iTunes 10 sees my AirPort Express and Apple TV first gen as valid AirPlay targets, for audio only currently.

Apple is also working with 3rd party device manufacturers to add AirPlay to their devices, like speakers and such.

Definitely a much-needed feature. This will be also be great for people who want to travel back and forth between home and work computers.

I think the future (not very soon) is in cloud storage for this stuff, but not until a whole lot gets figured out. This is great for now.

I see no mention of Hulu for the Apple TV on Apple's site or Hulu's, I'm surprised, or am I blind?

Hulu never came up in regards to the Apple TV. Being that Hulu Plus is out for the iPad, it is a bit surprising, especially when it did get Netflix.

I'm sure Apple considers Hulu more of a competitor. They'd probably prefer to see Hulu go away.

Why don't they see Netflix as a competitor equally then ?

Hulu "give away"/sell TV, Apple want to rent TV shows.
Netfix rent movies, Apple want to rent movies.

I'm sure they do as well. But Netflix isn't run by the studios and I'm sure Apple's going to take a cut from them. I just corrected a typo in the original post, it should have read "more of" not "more or."

Also, specifically, Hulu was founded and is partially owned by some of the media companies Apple has had the most trouble with in the past, and who also didn't sign on to the new rental model. I'm looking at you NBC Universal.

Uh, wut? Who is going to lock down a corporate computer, but put iTunes on it?

Actually, Netflix even has a decent number of TV shows on it. In fact, the TV selection is arguably of higher quality than their movies!

For a while Heroes (not an argument for quality ) was going up on Netflix a day behind the original air date, and even now you can stream every episode of the show through Netflix. There are dozens of other shows on there that I might try out simply because I have a Netflix subscription.

So I agree, I do think it's curious that Apple would put Netflix on there. The only other reason I can think of is that Netflix's strategy might be paying off: become ubiquitous. Having Netflix on your home theater device has almost become table stakes, so when you don't have it you stand out in a bad way.

If it wasn't hard enough for dedicated music streaming products to carve out a niche for themselves, things look to be getting even tougher.

Apple's Air Play is building some momentum in the press and adoption by industry players. Even without looking toward future products or those already announced and just shy of shipping, now we have firmware updates to released hardware to bring Apple streaming compatibility. Denon is going to issue an update for a receiver they released back in April to support Air Play.

I'm guessing once you have WiFi that the rest is all a matter of software. This could end up being quite ubiquitous.

Well, local streaming is one thing. Streaming outside the home is another, and so far it appears Apple isn't the least bit interested in that model. I'm still not sure why they bought the Lala people, other than to kill the business.