AppleTV! HOORAY!!!
Oh is this ever a wonderful little box. It was a snap to set up, except that it comes with NO VIDEO CABLES! Thanks so much, Apple. Could have at least shipped it with a component video cable. Anyway, the thing has an HDMI port, a component video output, optical and analog audio, a USB port, and an ethernet port. Be aware there is NO S-VIDEO output, so in case you have an older TV this will not function. It supports both 720p and 1080i (doesn't look like it supports 1080p yet...).
Setup is trivial. I plugged it into my Integra processor and turned the thing on. *poof* there it was. I'm currently syncing it to my video libraries. Apparently it makes copies of the video which can be a pain in the butt for large torrent files, but once it's done it should be fine and I'll be able to watch TORCHWOOD the way it should be seen. For music it's much faster. The optical audio input is a BIG win and makes a significant difference to the sound. Hooray.
In an attempt to sync photos, I seem to have crashed the connection between iTunes and the AppleTv box. I attempted to choose Aperture as the photo application which caused my devices list on iTunes to disappear and the picture to be lost for a few seconds. The music, however, continued to be fine. Restarting iTunes brought the devices list back and did not disrupt the music. Second time was the charm here, and Aperture was actually a selection in the dropdown menu. BIG WIN! It is now synching photos as well as everything else. Now I will see how quickly I can actually fill an AppleTV.
Looks like it's going to take a L O N G time to complete all this sync. Such is life :-).
The UI is typical Apple slick, easy for idiots, the manual is easy to understand and gives you a wonderful selection of probable scenarios for setup and use. The TV shows cute little album covers (when available) and length of time left in whatever song and times out to Apple's selection of photos. I have a feeling that will be replaced with my own photos once the sync finishes.
So... This is great! I like it! It's cool! I'm going to be playing with this thing all day long now, much to the dismay of my law partner. Woo hoo!