(2013-09-05, 19:43)ministerjee Wrote: Just when i made up my mind to get atv1200 because of external antenna,they are coming out with newer models
atv580 and atv1800, i dont know if i should wait or get one right now.so hard to decide.
i need a box badly.
Frankly, I was in the same quandary. My thoughts are the matter are
- if you wait for the next model, you will be waiting for the rest of your life. I have a WDTV Live - I should really have waited for my current ATV520 - but at least I learnt a lot from the WDTV and it was actually in use for a year, so it was not a total waste.
- I don't think you need a quad core. My dual core ATV520 is quite fast enough. I cannot image it being any faster, so cannot see how a quad core will be of much use. Nice, but not a feature that seems that important.
- cost. The newer models will (I assume) be a lot more expensive. My ATV520 cost me $80 delivered.
- Wifi. In my mind WiFi is a waste of time. I understand that is you HAVE to use WiFi, then so be it. It would probably be better to spend the money now on an external WiFi repeater - you will likely get a better WiFi experience.
- you will have no hope of porting to Linux for the foreseeable future. Even the dual cores are not at that point yet.
For me, the big thing was cost. The ATV520 was under the magic $100 limit (quite substantially). I can now treat it as a throw away item. If it works out (and it seems to be), then I look like a winner. This is also why the WDTV Live was not such a great loss - it was just on the arbitrary $100 limit.
When the quad cores come down to less than $100, I will probably look at getting one of them.
I think that the problem now is not the hardware - that is almost there. The problem now is the XBMC software - that is nowhere near stable. Even XBMC in Windows has a lot of bugs - but in android it is still very early days. I would prefer moving to Linux myself, but as yet that is not possible on my hardware.
(2013-09-05, 10:42)ciquta Wrote: We all agree wired is better, but since you don't have a wired option all you can do is make sure you get an external antenna to get the most of it.
I have a old 54mbps router a room away from my ATV and it's well enough to stream liveTV and HD videos without buffering.
I disagree. I think playing with the Wifi on the device is a waste of time if you are already getting a good signal. Adding an external antenna does nothing. What you can try is to get the signal via a different means. First up I would try an external repeater as that is the cheapest alternative. This can be very cheap, $20 China. I have one of these and they work very well - it just plugs into a power point. You then wire in via Ethernet from the repeater. Another thing to try is EOP - Ethernet over Power. This can work, although I have not tried it myself. It seems a very hit and miss fix - sometimes it works well - sometimes it does not work at all. I think it depends on your house power wiring. That will cost you a lot more though - around $80 - $120 or so.