The Apple TV is sold in Canada even though the Canadian version of the iTunes Music Store does not sell TV shows or Movies to use with it. So what use is the Apple TV here? How does one get media to it? Of course, one way is to get a U.S. billable address credit card with the help of either an American friend or relative and then you can easily purchase and utilize shows and movies. I tried this and downloaded an episode of the newly digitized Star Trek the Original Series for $1.99. The results on a large screen LCD were quite good but surprisingly, the playback on my new iPhone was astounding! Another way is by use of El Gato's excellent EyeTV tv tuner product which can be used to record broadcast or cable television to your Mac's hard drive. Now unfortunately, EyeTV also does not have Canadian support for its TV scheduling component but thanks to some nifty freeware and bit of "hacking" you can fool it into thinking that your Mac's own web server is the TitanTV site and you can get it to serve up TV Schedules from the excellent Zap2It web site. The software that makes all this happen for EyeTV is called EyeTV EPG Proxy. It is not particularly easy to set up. But once you have it working, scheduling the EyeTV to record is as easy as clicking a single button. The real beauty of all this is that another single click in EyeTV can tell it to repurpose a recording to iTunes specifically in Apple TV format. You can then have your show or movie sync directly to your Apple TV or you can stream it from the Mac to the Apple TV with a few clicks of your Apple remote. I've tried both and the results are brilliant. So, the Apple TV is still of use in Canada even if you don't have access to the U.S. version of the iTunes Music Store --but it will require a fair bit set-up and integration. And, if you need help you now know who to talk to. |
