Comparison Apple iTV vs SageTV...

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I'm not sure where you're coming from about not being able to right-click on items in iTunes. It has all sorts of context menus through the right mouse button. Possibly something in the way you had your mouse configured or an odd compatibility problem?

It may now, but when I tried it it didn't. Like I spelled out at the beginning of my post, I tried it a long time ago and it turned me off immediately in part because of that. And no, it wasn't a problem with the mouse - every other application and the OS worked fine. Microsoft standardized right-click something like 10 years ago, you have to work pretty hard to mis-configure that on a mouse.

I guess I've started to become less obsessive about things as I age. Now days I just want stuff that works. The less I have to tinker with something to get it to work the better. my iPod/iTunes combo just works and works very well to my liking. I do use music playback in SageMC. Sage is able to play all my AAC and now Apple Lossless files.

I've always tended to gravitate to solutions which let me do what I want. The more I have to fight with it to do something, the less effort I'll spend on it. I've found that I have to fight with Macs a lot more than Linux or Windows. This is also why I don't have an iPod. When I found out that you can't get your music back off of the iPod without hacking it I completely wrote them off.

Incidently, can Sage playback DRM'd AAC files you purchase from iTunes over the HD Extender? Most MP3 players these days can playback aac just fine, but they always have a little bit of fineprint which says they won't playback protected AAC.

Much better quality than any comparable MP3 I've ever heard.

All of the MP3s I ripped sound great, as long as you rip them at a high quality level. They also playback in all of my devices (old and new) without worry. It just works.

Possibly something in the way you ripped your MP3s, or an odd compatibility problem? [/quote]

Oh, and the previous comment about Mac mice not having more than one button is a little false now days. For one OS X has always had context menus. If you have a mouse with two buttons they are all accessible. Now with Apple's Mighty Mouse it may have only one physical button but it actually has three "buttons" via sensors in the surface of the mouse. It works quite well. I love my wireless Mighty Mouse.

Only slightly false. They have gotten better with OS/X, but they still refuse to let go of that foolish consistency. Applications still implement right-clicks inconsistently, and that will continue until Apple drops the single-button hobgoblin and makes multiple buttons part of their UI design spec as well as putting them on all of their laptops.

I had a fantastic demonstration of this the week before last. A "MacFan" at work was telling me this wasn't a problem anymore right before he loaded up a packet trace in Wireshark for us to analyze. Guess what? Right-click menus didn't work in Wireshark so we had to fumble clumsily with the filtering until I gave up and took the trace back to my office. Sure, it's not written by Apple, but right-click works in Linux and Windows without issue...


Cheers,
Slipshod

[mohanman]

I love Itunes.. the coverflow is great. I know I'm talking about a completely different topic, but the Iphone is by far the best phone out there. I don't know why someone would want something else?? It just doesn't make sense to me. They did a review of that Samsung Instinct in the New York Times and ripped it to shreds compared to the iphone. I know it doesn't have "third party" software yet, but that is coming.. the future looks bright! I have been on the plane for the last 12 hours, and this thing kept me company the whole time.. its amazing!

Another reason I love Itunes, is lets say I have a movie for my appletv, I can convert it real quick transfer it to my iphone then go. Sage does have some cool stuff like placeshifter though... If computers were more reliable and there was a faster way to change channels or have cablecard with a better sage interface.. it would be hard to beat hands down. But you guys are right, appletv is not a DVR.

I like my tivo because it has tivotogo and you can transfer shows from tivo to tivo. Again, I just didn't want to put the time into getting my computer set up.. especially with my dad coming over and being like "what is this sage, why does it keep crashing? Why does it keep changing the channels so slowly? How do you work this thing? Why don't you just get a regular tv like everyone else.."

Haha
Mo

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by mohanman

I know I'm talking about a completely different topic, but the Iphone is by far the best phone out there. I don't know why someone would want something else?? It just doesn't make sense to me.

The first-gen iPhone is a great concept and a ho-hum implementation. Unfortunately they were a few features shy of the full package, but they have fixed most (but not all) of it in the new version. Visual voice-mail is something I've been wanting for a LONG time, and it one of the truly inspired features. I probably would have gotten one just for that if they hadn't priced it sky-high. Here are the general strikes against it for me:

1. Call reliability in my area, as reported by my two friends who work for the same company and live in the general area, is crap. I already knew this because of the number of times I would call them and get voicemail, only to have them call me back immediately and bitch about the phone never ringing. If I still had my old job this would have been a deal-breaker all by itself. Now that I'm not on call anymore I don't care if it goes straight to vmail.

2. Battery - my friend don't bitch about bettery life much (some). The biggest issue I see with it is that it's not replacable. My wife and I tend to have the same phone model, and in emergencies I usually have a charged battery I can swap with if mine is going dead. Not with the iPhone...

3. It's supposed to be the best music-phone in the world, but the headphone jack is a recessed pain in the arse and it doesn't do stereo bluetooth or bluetooth AV control. Lame. My "free with contract" gen2 chocolate does, and it works great with my jabra headset.

4. You have the internet at your fingertips all the time, but it's in slow motion and costs $20/month. Not supporting 3G at launch was a big mistake.

5. Closed application platform - it's about the same as the Brew-based crap in my Chocolate, but not as good as an open Java platform. Android (if it ever becomes reality) should excel at this.

6. Multitouch.... While this is phenomenally cool, I get real irritated whenever I see Steve Jobs talking about how cool multitouch is and how Apple engineers invented it. This is complete PR BS: they bought a company called Fingerworks for the multitouch tech, stopped production on all their products, and adapted the tech to the ipod. I own two fingerworks products, and everytime somebody raved about multitouch to me I showed them how my keyboard worked and their jaw dropped. The iPod is a very, very limited implementation of the fingerworks product.

7th, and most important: Price. I spend a whole lot of money on tech toys, and there was no way I'd spend that much on a phone. I probably wouldn't have spent 600 on it no matter what it had.

Which brings us to the 3G iPhone. I'm excited about it - 3G+GPS+more realistic price is good. I haven't heard anything about the bluetooth support yet though, and that makes me nervous. And it still requires iTunes. I'll probably pickup one of the 8GB ones when my current contract runs out.

Another reason I love Itunes, is lets say I have a movie for my appletv, I can convert it real quick transfer it to my iphone then go.

For my SD shows and DVDs I don't even have to convert them. I plug in my Archos 705 and drag/drop the files. 160GB means I can have all my MP3s and my digital photo library on there was well and still have tons of space for Daily Show and Colbert or kids stuff. Having to convert is kind of a pain - it means I can't just grab and go. HD is another story, and I haven't even bothered trying.

Sage does have some cool stuff like placeshifter though... If computers were more reliable and there was a faster way to change channels or have cablecard with a better sage interface.. it would be hard to beat hands down. But you guys are right, appletv is not a DVR.

Channel changing speed is an issue, as is LiveTV support in general. I think the HD-PVR answers most of the cable-card concerns (without having cable-labs restrictions to negotiate), but you still have to live in fear of the analog hole being shut.

I like my tivo because it has tivotogo and you can transfer shows from tivo to tivo. Again, I just didn't want to put the time into getting my computer set up.. especially with my dad coming over and being like "what is this sage, why does it keep crashing? Why does it keep changing the channels so slowly? How do you work this thing? Why don't you just get a regular tv like everyone else.."

Tivo has a fantastic product, and that's what I recommend to my non-tech-tinker friends. Others I recommend Sage to, and the two who bought it (with an HD extender) are *very* happy with it, and they don't use any of the TV DVR functions at all. It's a video/mp3 jukebox that does DVDs w/ menus and 1080p MKVs to them. Not quite as slick an interface as the AppleTV, but it plays their HD content at full res and they didn't have to futz with it to get DVDs w/ menus playing.

[mohanman]

So far I have been converting my movies for appletv (should be getting it later this week), and things have been working out well. Appletv only supposedly supports 720p, so i have been using visual hub. The cover art is awesome in Itunes. I also got that elgato turbo to convert my avi/divx files into mp4..

We will see what happens.

Iphone is the best!

[mickp]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

To each their own but a whole lot has changed since those days of Apple. Those were actually the Sculley years when Apple took kind of a nose dive. Apple bought NeXT along with Jobs and he practically saved the company. OS X is quite a different beast compared to the OS 8.5 or 9 you were running on those Mac SE's.

I used to be kind of a Mac hater. I now have an Intel Mac Mini and love it. It's one of the best machines I have. I'm going to eventually get a MacBook.



One thing you have to remember is that AppleTV isn't really trying to compete with PVR technology like SageTV. There is no way to record live TV without extra software.

I honestly can't understand how anyone would prefer SageTV's music organization. Probably the least usable part of it. SageTV's music library is quite abhorrent compared to iTunes. This is one area of SageTV that needs a whole lot of work.

But as I said earlier, to each their own.

Bah. I had a party and invited all of my friends the day I finally managed to delete itunes etc from my system. It's the worst program I've ever used for music. YUCK!!!1! Rubbish!!!1!!!1! Boooo!

Admittedly the main technical problem that I had with it was that all of my music is in MS lossless (which works wonderfully for everything else about the place including sage) so I had to store everything a second time as apple lossless so that it could go onto the ipod. I'm much happier now with my gigabeat windows pmc based player and not a sceric of Apple software anywhere.

So far as music interface goes the ipod is also pretty rubbish imho. The sound quality was pretty bad too with the equaliser distorting on many tracks if not set flat (known ipod problem afaik and much more frequent/common than the mac fanbois would have you think).

Bah! itunes doesn't even seem to realy know what an album is. Give me Windows Media Player any day.

SageMC is the only music interface that I'm familiar with on Sage and there are a couple of things that I'd change on it, though I certainly wouldn't be requesting that it become more like an apple product.

Each to their own though I guess.

Mick.