Youtube on my TV....

I wonder how the crappy quality will look on a big screen if it already sucks on PC.

It's nice to see the Apple TV getting a increased hard disk...hardly! With UK/EMEA users still having virtually no (legal) access to the vast amount of film and TV content that US users have in iTunes, what is the point?

Until Apple decide to get around this lack of content on iTunes for international users, this product is just going to remain a 'nice to have'.

I recently got a HD LCD. As part of my excitement phase, I connected a laptop up to it in glorious 1366x768, and proceeded to watch the microsoft HD trailers (recommended) and browse youtube.

Once I got to youtube, I realised I didn't really want to browse it. THERE WAS NOTHING THERE! Sure, videos of some guy making a card hover are interesting, but not something I'm going to spend my time doing. The vast majority of youtube content is, the be frank, shit. Youtube's use is in hosting videos that otherwise wouldn't be hosted - video's of specific things that you discover through external links. It is not any use as a browsing site, because you have to sift through piles of crap to find one, 10 second, interesting clip.

why they think this a positive I don't know.

And also - can they not just install an FLV player on the apple TV - there's already plenty of OS X FLV players anyway.

AppleTV, needs DIVX support. The bigger disk is nice, but I'd like to just plug in one of those 500GB USB disks too. YouTube is very popular so thats a big plus.

But I have a Nintendo Wii, what I'd like is a streaming Codec for the Wii. So that I can play from any source to this 'display' codec, and it would send the data across the network to my Nintendo Wii and display it on TV. Just streaming, not a complicated system. The Wii would simply be another display device.

Did they get a bargain on 160 GB drives? As cheap as drives are these days, why not 300 or more? For the extra price, they could install a drive double the size & still be making a large profit.

the drive is a 2.5 inch laptop drive that runs on 5 volts only ( there is no 12 volts avaialbla in the box ....

and 160 gig is about as much you can get today for a 2.5 gig drive.

I wonder if the iTV can playback real High definition video (WMV-HD format or M2T files) .. anyone knows that ?

it would be great to be able to play back the footage from my HD videocamera from this box instead of having to hook up the computer every time.

..cause it's prolly a laptop drive...

AppleTV uses a laptop drive. AFAIK 200GB is the largest right now. 160GB is plenty, and since you obviously don't have one, I don't think it really matters to you at all.

I totally agree with the comments above. YouTube is designed for the PC and successful due to viral marketing. Watching YouTube content - or searching for it - on my TV is perhaps the biggest waste of my life I can imagine. The quality will be abysmal, the content equally so...

1) you really dont want to see such low-res low-rate movies on your fancy TV

2) hack the AppleTV to play quicktime with the swiss army of codecs -Perian

(it then makes AppleTV worthwhile)

3) you can already do this on a Wii (watch youtube and various other formats)

4) in reply to another comment - you can use 'orb' to stream stuff from a PC to watch on your Wii

There are many ways of getting Apple TV Content that's worth watching, TVmax+, for one, allows you to pull programmes from a sky plus or freeview DVR and put them on a harddrive. Why pay Apple for DRM content when, with a little effort, you don't have to.

Cheap and free software allows you to back your DVDs up to your computer and these backups can be easily converted to Apple TV compliant codecs.

Youtube wasn't designed for the living room, watch you've been framed instead, the quality just isn't their, that's content as well not just video quality.

And finally, it doesn't really matter what size the internal harddrive is, this is a streamer with the convience of a Hard Drive for your favorites or for use as a buffer, having another location to store my video/music/photos/etc in addition to my NAS/Computers will just get more confusing.