Last Friday I received my Income Tax return and felt the need to buy myself something nice. I just got done watching Geekbrief TV where Cali reviewed the Apple TV and I was sold. I’ve been on a strict budget for the past few months so I felt a little guilty dropping $300 on an Apple TV. So I made myself an internal compromise. I said if I sell my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, I’ll buy myself an Apple TV, which would pay for at least half of it. I immediately call up the local Apple Store to make sure they had some Apple TV’s in stock. They did and off I went.

Well its been a full week and I have to say I love the box. Previously I used Front Row on my Macbook hooked up via DVI. While it did the job, it wasn’t an elegant solution. The Apple TV setup was a breeze which if you used any Apple product, thats a given. The interface is what really sold it for me. Since I don’t have cable, I get my TV shows from iTunes, download podcasts and subscribe to Netflix for my media fix. Only thing I would have liked is a DVD player inside but I understand the decision not to include it. My Xbox 360 does have a DVD player and it works. Thats good enough for me.

While my new Apple TV is awesome, I’m going to have to give credit where its due here. I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my Apple TV as much as I am if it wasn’t for Visualhub who has helped me convert all my existing media over to h264. The program is simply awesome for converting to different video formats and its amazingly fast. I did run into one small problem when trying to convert previously ripped h264 files from Mediafork but it was easily fixed by changing a setting. The latest version 1.23 even supports outputting to Apple TV. If you need to convert some media to Apple TV, I cannot say enough good things about Visualhub. Worth every penny of the $23.

The 40G hard drive is tiny in comparison to my iTunes library which last I checked was around 140 gigs. Hacking the Apple TV’s hard drive is definitely in my future but I’d really like to go to a 250 gig drive which they don’t make yet. So in the meantime, I’m just keeping unwatched media synced which its actually pretty nice. I know what new podcasts are out and new TV shows and don’t have to worry about wading through everything. For the rest I just stream from my Macbook. I have the Apple TV hookup via wired ethernet so syncing and streaming is fast.