Apple TV review

Hooked it up last night and did some testing. Here are my initial thoughts.

Set up: Easy, though I did have to restart my router to connect appleTv to it (more of a crappy router issue than anything else).

Music: Sounded great, love the album artwork aspect. I did have a couple of hiccups playing a song but it was also syncing all my photos so that could have had something to do with it. Didn't retry after the photos were done copying.

Video: Video quality for dvd's I had ripped (at full resolution) looked great and played without a problem. However, I have 2 serious issues that have left me with a bad taste.
1) Sorting of tv shows. The menu does not sort by season or episode, despite that information being entered in iTunes. Just a list of shows alphabetically. At least it separates Seinfeld from Saturday Night Live. I'm thinking I will need to rename all my titles to include season and episode number to get it to sort correctly. I would really rather have a drill down menu by season at the very least.

2) Dolby Digital 5.1 support, or lack thereof. My goal with this was to take my 250 or so dvd's and rip them in their full resolution with 5.1 and be able to pull up any movie at any time and get an equivalent or near equivalent movie without having to hunt for the dvd. Not having 5.1 is breaking my heart. I almost cried when it wasn't playing it. I imagine this will be a deal breaker for many people that are looking at this as being the ultimate media solution as I was.

All in all, it's sooooo close but yet not quite there. I'm hopeful that Apple will hear these issues and address them.