This week, in addition to the release of the highly acclaimed Appaloosa, iTunes has three great movies for 99cent rental; Dumb and Dumber, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Bringing Down the House

A couple of weeks ago, we rented Monty Pythons Holy Grail directly from our Apple TV, it was quick instant and easy, if iTunes keeps this up, the Pirate Bay will lose it’s appeal.

Phonograph

Eight Track

Casette

Laser Disc

Vinyl

VHS

CD

Minidisc

DVD

NetFlix

BluRay

The Apple TV 2.0 or ‘Take Two’ Update includes a host of wonderful features that I had to share with you: The greatest news about this new release is that all of the features of it are available to all of us Apple TV 1.0 owners, simply navigate into ‘Settings’ from the main screen of the Apple TV, click ‘Update Software” and follow the simple steps that the Apple TV takes you through, downloading the update takes about 15-30 minutes on a standard broadband connection, following this, the Apple TV asks you if you wish to ‘Update Now” or ‘Update Later’. Clicking ‘Update Now’ will cause the Apple TV to reboot and begin installing it’s updates, the Apple TV actually needs to run a total of three reboots and patches, after which you’ll see a brand new intro video full of glitz and style which brings you to the new and advanced Apple TV 2.0 menu screen.
It’s a highly intuitive interface with categories organized in a new and more sensible method, if you have some time to watch a quick tutorial video, Apple is hosting a wonderful quick guide here: http://www.apple.com/appletv/guidedtour/
Three of the greatest new features of the Apple TV 2.0 from my perspective are the following:

• Requirement to own or have a computer in the residence now unnecessary: Apple TV can browse, buy and rent Movies, TV Shows and Music directly from the living room couch

• Flickr browsing: The amazing collection of world class photography on the Yahoo! owned website and service called Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) is directly browsable from your TV, the photography on Flickr is pretty amazing, and viewing these on your large screen High Definition TV is a real pleasure.

• AirTunes: an understated but wonderful new feature that’s included in the Apple TV 2.0 update is ‘AirTunes’, this was previously only available through the ‘Airport Express’, but is now enabled by default on the Apple TV (read more about it here: http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/features/airtunes.html), what it offers is a way to control the music playing through the Apple TV/HiFi from your Mac, in party situations this is an ESSENTIAL feature. Furthermore, Airtunes supports many devices, so say you already have an Apple Airport Express playing Music to your home stereo, but your Apple TV is in your entertainment room connected to your TV and Dolby Surround Sound, up till now, when you had a party, that room may have had it’s own soundtrack based on the Apple TV’s contents, now, with Airtunes, you simply select the devices you wish to play music through from iTunes on your Desktop PC/MAC or Notebook and the Apple TV plays along with the other devices. Looking forward, this allows multiple rooms (Say Living Room, Den, Lounge, Game Room) to each have an Apple TV full of independant media, but when you want to fill the house with Led Zeppelin from your personal MacBook it’s a snap, indeed, visiting folks with PC’s or Macs running iTunes can do exactly the same, instantly be DJ for the entire house from anywhere on your WiFi network, all without wires.

There are many more great features to the Apple TV including instant Movie rentals in standard or High Definition, browsing and instant watching of a huge range of Audio and Video Podcasts, Browsing .Mac photo galleries, and as I alluded to, purchasing Albums and songs by your favorite artists live on your TV is quite incredible (Did I mention that of course everything you purchase on the Apple TV syncs to your main computer’s library and then to your iPod/iPhone et al.

Thank you all for being early adopters of this great technology, I’ve seen it used by many of my clients in a variety of ways, sometimes to primarily stream music, sometimes to primarily show photos, everybody who has tried it has been very impressed and I’m confident that you will all appreciate the new features of the Apple TV once you run the update and get some time to try it out.
If you have any questions or comments about your Apple TV and it’s new softwarr, I’d love to hear from you, and will be glad to talk on the telephone or pay you a visit to run your Apple TV through it’s paces and get your network running really speedy to let it perform best for you.
You can read more about the Apple TV here: http://www.apple.com/appletv
There are also reviews of the latest Apple TV here: http://gizmodo.com/355843/apple-tv-20-reviewhere: http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-media-receivers/apple-tv-40gb/4505-6739_7-32306442.html?tag=nefd.ledeand possibly the most well informed review here: http://www.macworld.com/article/132085/2008/02/apple_tv_take_two.html

Via the remarkable Steven Frank from Panic, An incredibly easy way to save videos from Daily Motion, YouTube etc…

An Apple certified evangelist is awaiting your phone call to help you get the most out of your Mac. Certified by Apple in OS X support, I provide consultations on Panther, Jaguar, Tiger and the amazing New Leopard operating system. Would you like it to do more for you? automate your calendar events, simplify your music collection, handle the party music for your elaborate home audio system.

or lets talk about video, I evangelise the Apple TV, apple’s great product that brings your entire iTunes library to your living room, your bedroom, in fact any rooms in fact you’d like to listen to the large music library that you’ve spent so much time building, wouldn’t it be great to play all that music from the comfort of your living room couch? Call for a example of it’s usefulness.

Mac Hardware, software and Networking is all under our microscope, Apple has certified us as experts and we are so happy to bring this expertise to you.

AuburnCom is a registered San Francisco company with clients from Marin county, Sausalito, Yerba Buena island, the city of San Francisco and as far south as Daly City, we make house calls to the East Bay, and ship replacement and upgrade superdrives to faraway states including Texas and Massachusettes.

Call us on 415-871-9683, email brendan@auburncom.com or visit http://www.auburncom.com to find out more about us or how we can make things better and easier for you.

A sample of one of our tutorials:  

Obviously, to use this, you’re going to have to have a mac with at least Tiger, and a copy of VisualHub.Let’s say you’ve got your iPhone, your mac with Tiger, and a copy of VisualHub.

First, you need to be able to script VisualHub. To do that, you’re going to have to download this special script dictionary.Next you’re going to install this script library. To do so you need to…

To learn more, call or email Brendan at AuburnCom 415-871-9683 for expert Mac advice and tutorials.   

At the All things Digital conference, Steve Jobs revealed a surprise for everybody, the Apple TV will stream and play videos directly from youtube starting in June, the reason that we’re waiting is also the best news for us, youtube is converting its videos to h264 just for this purpose, h264 is the next generation video codec embraced by Apple (as all the best new technologies have been (USB, firewire, LED backlight displays).
The Apple TV is now also shipping in a 160Gb model for $399 as well as the 40Gb model at $299, thats a great deal as the Hard drive alone for that model will cost you just under $200, and the Apple TV is actually a fully functioning OS X workstation at it’s heart.