A long while back i got what turned out to be a worthless box that I thought would forever live in my closet, an AppleTV. I first got it with the hopes of hacking it to play DivX and other media but soon learned that was much harder than I expected. Since I simply hate iTunes and would rather eat glass than be forced to use it the AppleTV was of very little use to me. And yes I knew all this going in and didn't care, I just wanted to play.

Well Apple finally released the Take 2 update for AppleTV last week. So yesterday afternoon I took advantage of my sick day off and updated my AppleTV to see what the new changes were like. Gone is the pretty scrolling interface of the first AppleTV, instead replaced with an extremely boring, square two column menu system. While this works just fine it looks like shit - very non-Apple if you ask me. But ok, how are the new features? Well the main one I was interested in (and will review here) was renting an HD movie from the iTunes store directly from the device. I'm happy to say this works well and is easy enough. You can browse through the HD movies and once you've chosen one you can even watch the trailer if you want. I selected my movie and for $4.99 I rented the HD version (their HD selection sucks right now but should be growing). Once I selected it I had to put in my iTunes ID information (which I should only have to do once). A few minutes after it started downloading it said it was available to view, a nice touch. It of course has the typical DRM shit on it, I can watch it as much as I want for 24 from the moment I start watching it.

So how did it look and sound? Well it sounded great, no pops, cracks or scratches. It also looked very nice, but not "full" HD. I've got my AppleTV connected to a 46" Sharp 1080p LCD and while it looks very good I definitely could see some encoding artifacts and lots of banding in gradient color areas. I'm not sure what real resolution/bitrate it was but it sure wasn't 1080p. It didn't look so bad that I was upset, I'd say it looked like a standard DVD upscaled to 1080 - but a very good upscale.

All-in-all a good experience, if they continue to increase the HD selection I will definitely be renting from them again. Now if only it were prettier and if it only had a real remote, gotta get my Harmony 880 programmed to control it, I just know I'm going to break that little thing.