My trusty old Xbox has been getting long in the tooth lately, but it doesn’t owe me anything. It has been the best $100 appliance I’ve ever bought, hands down. Hacking it to run Xbox Media Centre made it the ultimate media service appliance, playing every movie, TV show, MP3, Shoutcast stream or movie trailer I could throw at it from my PC to whatever TV I wanted around the house. Though I haven’t quite taken the leap yet, XBMC has made me seriously consider getting rid of cable. Who needs the ads, the static schedules, the crappy quality? Unfortunately after 5 years of heavy use the ‘ol ‘box has started complaining, its transplanted 120GB HD has started making odd noises lately and the fans sound like rutting sheep most of the time. So enter… Microsoft’s arch nemesis!

The AppleTV has been out for a few years now and people haven’t really known what to make of it. Essentially a media slinging appliance tied into Apple’s iTunes store it started off fairly pricy and never really found a home. Recently, though, people smarter than me have gotten their grubby little paws into its guts and started opening up new possibilities, chief among them Boxee and XBMC. There’s something twistedly satisfying in running XBOX Media Centre on an Apple Product.

First, the good. The AppleTV is a compact, fanless little pie-box that fits unobtrusively in any setup. It features HDMI and Component video and Optical/RCA audio outputs. No composites for you folks who haven’t joined the 90s though, sorry. Also present are ethernet and USB connections while an 802.11n wireless interface hides inside. There’s no buttons or direct interface on the unit itself, not even a reset button. In typical Apple fasion its form over function.

Once you hook up the unit you’re presented with some very basic setup menus and thats it, you’re ready for all your iTunes needs! The interface is very minimal but effective providing you access to your local iTunes libraries on machines visible via Ethernet/Wireless as well as online content from Apple. The movie content available from Apple is quite impressive and streams quickly, with trailers starting in under 10 seconds. HD (720p) content takes a bit longer but still well within the realm of reason. I haven’t done any movie renting yet but the prices are in-line (cheaper!) than blockbuster. I could definitely see using this service. TV shows are available as well at around $15-20 a season or $1.99 an episode. Considering the intended purpose I had in buying the ATV though, I can’t see these getting much use.

Also available within the Apple interface is a very diverse library of Video Podcasts. These were an unexpected perk and I spent an entire weekend watching lectures from the TED conference streamed quickly and in high quality straight to my TV. These podcasts aren’t anything you can’t find on their respective websites, but having them all in one place and on your TV makes them vastly more accessible. Video podcasts are available on all kinds of subject matter from travel, cooking, educational, sports and video games. The CBC has a pretty good selection too!

Installation of Boxee/XBMC was just about as dead simple as any operation could be. Using a USB stick an installer creates a bootable patch system that you load onto your ATV by turning it on with the stick inserted. Wait 5-10 minutes and it does all of its own work. Thats it! Now when you load the ATV interface you have new options for both Boxee and XBMC including functionality to update to the latest versions as they’re relased. The Xbox was easy, this is absolute childs play!

Boxee is an offshoot of XBMC geared more towards social sharing of media and streaming online content. I see where its going but it doesn’t really hold a lot of appeal for me. First off, I really don’t find any draw in the social interface. I don’t care what my friends are watching and if they want to recommend something to me they’ll just tell me. The streaming content would probably have more value except its 90% US-based content which is regionally filtered. Without jumping through VPN hoops most of it is not available.

XBMC is the same app we’ve come to know and love on the Xbox. The patch stick installer installs the latest ‘Atlantis’ Alpha build which has an extremely nice looking 720p geared skin that looks amazing on an HD TV. No more analog fuzziness! All the codec support is there and media is played over Windows shares without a hitch. There’s a couple of functionality bits that aren’t present but for the most part everything is great! It IS an Alpha build, anyway!

There’s always some bad, however. The biggest issue I have with the ATV (and by extension, anything running on it) is the remote. ALSO in Apple form-over-function style, the remote is a stick of gum affair with only 6 buttons. Four directions, play/pause and menu. The Xbox remote that I’m used to, by comparrison, has dozens of buttons allowing XBMC to be controlled in a number of ways. After living with the Apple remote for a few days I no longer actively hate it, but I’ll be very glad when the XBMC/Boxee folks figure out how to allow me to use my Harmony 550 Universal remote to add a bit more control to the package.

Another weak spot is 720p playback. Under XBMC the ATV can be picky about 720p HD content due to the fact the aftermarket software can’t make use of the nVidia 7300 GPU to help with the rendering duties. So while you can view high def video with no problem when downloaded from the iTunes store, XBMC can struggle a bit. Hopefully this is something the community will resolve as well, but at the end of the day I don’t really care about high def that much.

One final gripe is the fact that the unit never actually turns off. Since its designed to constantly be synching your media, downloading podcasts, updating catalogs from the iTunes store, its constantly talking over the network and occasionally spinning up/down its 40GB internal HD. I wish this weren’t the case but I hooked the ATV up to a Kill-a-Watt power meter which tells me its drawing 17W at idle (21W under load). Thats not the end of the world, I guess. Over the course of a 3 day weekend with plenty of use the ATV drew just over 1kWh. I’d still rather it just shut down completely, however.

For $209 from the Apple Refurbished Store I think this little unit will fill my media needs nicely for a while to come. Sure, there are more capable streamers out there, such as the Popcorn Hour or gaming consoles like the PS3 and its BluRay drive, but those options are easily twice the price and, much to my own surprise, the lack of access to the iTunes store would be a big loss in those units.

… when did this become a tech blog?