Last week I described my initial experiences with setting up “Apple TV” (hereafter referred to as “ATV”), Apple’s new set-top box designed to deliver the movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, audiobooks, and, photos on your Mac or PC to “the big screen” – your television. After a few weeks with the ATV I’m pleased to report that it does everything it claims to do flawlessly. Not a single glitch. Zip. Zero. None.

Some tech pundits have criticized the ATV not so much for what it does, but what it doesn’t do. ATV has no TV tuner, so it can’t be a DVR (digital video recorder, like a TiVo). ATV’s small (by today’s media standards) 40GB hard drive would fill up quickly if used to store a whole bunch of TV-shows-you-missed and movies recorded from HBO. Since Apple is in the business of selling both TV shows and movies, it makes sense that they wouldn’t provide a means for viewers to capture them for free.

ATV can, however, receive content streamed directly from the internet. Many theatrical movie trailers and TV program previews are available, streamed directly from Apple’s web site and iTunes Store. They look great, and are viewable almost instantaneously on a decent broadband connection.

ATV is also bereft of a DVD player, either standard or high definition (HD). Most people have DVD players connected to their TVs already, and including a high-definition DVD player in ATV would at least double the price. Which reminds me. I never told you the price. ATV is $299.

Speaking of HD, ATV is capable of displaying content encoded at a maximum 1280x720 pixels (the low end of the HD spectrum). However, none of the movie content currently available on the iTunes Store is HD. It’s all standard definition, or “near-DVD-quality” at 640x480 pixels. This is due in part to the long download times required for higher definition offerings. Using my pretty fast DSL connection (5 MBps), a 100-minute 640x480 movie purchased from the iTunes Store took about 30 minutes to download. Sometime down the road, as HD TVs gain more market penetration, and faster consumer broadband connections are available, Apple will certainly offer higher definition content.

So how does one get movie content onto their ATV other than purchasing it from the iTunes Store? Several software solutions are available, both for Macs and PCs, that can “rip” commercial movie DVDs onto one’s computer, similar to how iTunes and other digital jukeboxes “rip” CDs. For those of us over 25, “rip” means to convert the contents of a CD or DVD into a format playable on a computer.

One excellent free DVD conversion application on the Mac platform is called Handbrake (Google it for the website). Handbrake, on a fast Mac like my Core2Duo iMac, can convert a two-hour standard-definition (720x480) DVD into a high-quality Apple TV-ready h.264 QuickTime movie in about 2.5 hours. The resulting movie file is about 2GB in size.

Once Handbrake has done its thing, you simply drop the movie into iTunes, where it is copied into your iTunes Library. Tell iTunes to sync it with ATV, and, in my setup, my 802.11n Airport Extreme whisks it wirelessly (and surprisingly swiftly) to the ATV. Slower wireless networks will, of course, take longer.

On my standard-definition TV, the picture is very good – as good as my Comcast digital cable movie channels, and very close to the original DVD.

Our digital photos, synced to the ATV through iPhoto, also look great. There’s no conversion needed with photos, as photos taken with six megapixel cameras are more high definition than, well, high definition itself.