I've found the AppleTV to be suprisingly nice to have.

I bought a 40Gb one for USD 239 at the AppleStore in Galleria, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Since the January keynote the price for the AppleTV has dropped in the US. Unfortunately it has not dropped in price ANYWHERE else in the world (check the UK AppleStore and see). Obviously, the price in Malaysia remains at the old price point.

I've since upgraded the hard drive to a Western Digital Scorpio 2.5in 250GB PATA drive bought at A-One, Digital Mall PJ for RM415 which included a 2.5in USB 2.0 hard disk case which was required to clone the original hard drive. The cloning process requires expanding the original 40GB Media partiiton. I tried for hours to do this with Terminal (which is free) but due to my noobishness with Unix was unable to do so. Finally lost patience and sprung for iPartition from Coriolis Software (which cost me another US49) . I'd put photos up of the HD upgrading process but there are already so many on the web (which were very useful to me when performing the upgrade that I won't bother here).

The end result:

I've now got 230 Gb to use for Movies/TV Shows/Music Video/Music/Photos.

I used to gripe that the usefullness of the the AppleTV is limited by the fact that it is tied to the iTunes Music Store. While I DO have an iTunes music store account and have bought stuff from there I also download from torrents. Thing is: it is VERY easy to add downloaded torrents to the AppleTV. I use iSquint (free) to convert downloaded .avi files to .mp4 which I then drag over to iTunes on my MacPro. It is then automatically synced to the AppleTV. I am also able to specify that the downloaded content is a TV Show, group them as a series, add "cover art" and even fill in the plot synopsis which is all dutifully displayed on the AppleTV.

The upshot?

Think of the AppleTV as iTunes for your downloaded .avi collection.... Remember when you had all those .mp3 files in a mess from various sources and how iTunes has simplified its categorization and added album art to boot? Well, the AppleTV now does that for my downloaded TV/movie shows.

I'd be please to answer any questions you guys might have. I have a Shuttle windowsXP box next to the Sony Bravia together with the AppleTV but in terms of functionality the AppleTV is WAAAAY better. I also bought a ExtremeMac HDMI splitter (USD 99 at the AppleStore in Fort Lauderdale) so I can connect my HDMI DVD player and the AppleTV at the same time (my Bravia only has one HDMI input). As the ExtremeMac HDMI splitter has four inputs I can also connect the PlayStation3 to the setup should I finally find a game I want to play on the PS3...

what about downloaded HD content such as x264 in mkv file?

Dunno. Cos I don't have a TV capable of HD display, I've not tried to download HD content.

An update. Using Roxio Popcorn 3.0.2 simplifies the process of adding content to iTunes (and therefore for automatic sync to the AppleTV) but note that Popcorn is commercial software. iSquint on the other hand is free.