Does anybody have any experience with Apple TV??

Is it any good??

Is it worth the £199-269 price tag and do people recomend that over other similar media centres

Depends what you want to do with it and what you already have.

If you already have a half decent laptop connected to a wireless network, it can do everything Apple TV can do ... and more.

If you want to stream DivX/Xvid, you need to hack the box as it won't play these by default.

Generally, they don't seem to be very popular. Even a few of the mac fanboys aren't too keen on them.

Apple TV is a great piece of kit, be sure to hack it with aTV flash (which costs 50 dollars) it allows your Apple TV to do a hell of alot more like play every format and attach an external USB drive to it.

If you have an iPhone you can even use it as a fancy remote for the ATV.

i have an appletv and had no need to hack it. H.264 mpeg4 is my preference anyway.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2225/...451973.jpg?v=0

Worth hacking for the extra features too like adding extra storage. Anf with the aTV flash it's really easy.

maybe for some, but i get everything i need without hacking.
all my content is already in the correct format and i don't have any need to hang an external HDD off the back of it.

Ther are lots of media players out there and they all have pro's n con's. You have to decide on which one gives you what you want (or at least the most important ones to you).

I have the Apple tv and find it excellent for my purposes. For me it worked first time out of the box and it does exactly what it says. Quality via HDMI is excellent for movies and photos with good audio too. It is easy to use and syncs seamlessly with iTunes on my Macbook. If you want more versatility and maybe a fully fledged browser on a HDTV then consider the Mac Mini too although it is a little more expensive.

I just dont know, i really dont wanna have to convert all of my video files to apple format but I can use my Ipod Touch as a remote which I like aha

Whatever you decide, you can pick up the Apple TV 40GB for £184 from Amazon or the Apple TV 160GB from Misco for £273.69

I purchased ours just before v2.0 software came out. Both me and my wife think it's great.

We've ripped about 70% of our DVD's into H.264 and stream it to Apple TV from an old PowerPC iMac with 5TB of external storage (2.5TB for content, 2.5TB for backup).

I only store music (about 40GB) and photo's (12GB) on the Apple TV, streaming everything else via Airport Extreme.

We've rented HD Movies from iTunes (The Bucket List) and the quality was excellent IMO better than my Sky HD movies - which we've now cancelled.

Copying the DVD's is a bit of an effort, but it tidies up our room and their quality if great. We also copy a load of films/TV programmes onto our iPod's and watch them when we're away in Spain.

Overall a great bit of kit.

Roger