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I am slowly getting hooked onto Podcasts – thanks to apple tv.
If you are a digital photographer, the NAPP podcasts are amazing.
http://www.imaginginsider.com/?p=32179
Search for NAPP in iTunes store and subscribe. Oh, the Steve Jobs / Bill Gates interview is not available in iTunes as a video podcast as well. It is pretty huge [~900 MB video], but it is awesome. I watched the whole thing *again*. If you are a geek, it is a MUST watch.
I switched to an iMac for my home use [photo editing, video editing, some coding]. Life has been blissful. It was soon followed by an appleTv which was a breeze to set up. Seeing photos on large screen TV with music is really cool. Soon enough, an airport extreme followed.
My sis-in-law saw the setup, saw how easy it was to set this thing up and bought an Apple Tv. She runs Windows XP and has a Linksys WRT54G router. I expected the setup to be as painless as my mac setup – and I was wrong.
We could never get iTunes in XP to see apple tv. The apple tv got a proper IP address, talked to the internet just fine [downloads movie trailers], was pingable from the windows box, but no, it won’t simply show up in the iTunes devices list.
We tried everything Apple’s website says. Turned off Windows firewall [makes sense], turned off the routers firewall [makes no sense], punched holes for the iTunes sharing ports. Added the ports explicitly in windows firewall – and in the router. Nothing, nothing worked.
Apple’s tech support wasn’t very helpful apart from saying “talk to Microsoft or Linksys”. The Genius bar “genius” did a factory reset on the apple tv and it showed up in his Windows XP. Of course, that meant that he also said “talk to Microsoft or Linksys”.
So after about 20 hours of painful debugging, netstat -a, firmware upgrades on the wrt54g, infinite reboots of all 3 devices, her apple tv went back 
. I still like my apple tv, it just works fine for me – but when things go wrong, particularly in a multi vendor situation, you are pretty much on your own.
