I posted earlier today that during Steve Jobs conversation with Walt Mossburg, he also mentioned that Apple would be shipping a Software Update that allows you to view YouTube videos on your Apple TV. It has a complete interface and takes advantage of all of YouTubes features.

Click Here to see a screenshot taken from Steve Job’s presentation showing the interface of the YouTube feature on the Apple TV.

Steve Jobs said that the update will come in mid June via a Software Update. It will be interesting to see how Apple delivers a software update to the Apple TV, and I wonder if it will be administered via iTunes. Steve Jobs also mentioned a search function, and i wonder how this will be done with the Apple TV, considering you only have a basic 5 button remote. Steve Jobs announced this, and many other updates at All Things Digital, today. You can watch a 10 minute highlight video by clicking here.

I know this is iAppblog, but this is too good of a story to pass on. Today during Steve Job’s conversation with Walt Mossburg, Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be selling a 160GB model of the Apple TV, for $399 USD. It will be available tomorrow. This model does not replace the current 40GB Apple TV, it just adds to the line. Perviously, people have cracked open their Apple TVs to insert a 160, or even 200 GB hard drives.

The Apple TV, which was previewed during Apples “It’s Showtime” event in September 2006, with the code name iTV, was heavily spoken about at MacWorld 2007, in January. After MacWorld, the Apple TV was available for pre-order, and said by Apple to ship in February, did not ship till late March. There have been many hacks since the Apple TV has been shipping, including running OS X Tiger on it, and running the Apple TV interface on an Mac with an intel processor.

Apple also anounced today during the conversation with Walt Mossburg that they will have a Apple TV plugin for youTube available in Software Update in mid June.

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: To learn what VisualHub does one can dissect the name. Visual-Hub. OK, so you still can’t guess. VisualHub is a video conversion app that can convert just about anything you would need to. It uses the reasonably fast back-end FFmpeg to convert video at a speedier pace than QuickTime Pro. It converts video in about real-time on a new Mac. You don’t have to know that an iPod with video can handle 640 by 480 resolution video at 30 frames per second to use this app. VisualHub has presets that can convert video to formats supported by ?ج£¬øtv, iPod 5G, North American and non-North American TV, PSP, Final Cut, DVD, Wii, various web formats, and a whole lot more than you’ll ever need.
In addition to all of those presets, you can change all of the usual advanced options like crop, deinterlace, resolution, frame rate, bitrate, codecs, and (you guessed it) a lot more. Very convenient and timesaving is the fact that you can save these settings as a file to make your own presets. Another timesaving aspect is preview and “video info”. Preview alone can do a lot to prevent you from using the wrong settings, saving re-encoding time. The best thing about VisualHub is it’s price. QuickTime Pro costs $29.99 at first. The problem Apple QuickTime Pro has is, besides it’s slowness, that you can lose your license with an upgrade to the next major version. Also, that license losing upgrade is essentially forced as new iTunes music and video often requires QuickTIme to be at it’s latest version. Next contenders, Roxio’s Popcorn and Crunch, $49.99 and $39.99. VisualHub’s price is $23.32. FFmpeg X is free and hard to install, and doesn’t work too well.
The only problems I have with VisualHub are with it’s interface. On the top left of the main window is a box showing “VisualHub” and more info about the app. Why? It simply wastes space on a product you paid for. Second, the “To:” label designating the sections of presets is discolored and has it’s own background. Lastly, is the reliance on ugly, separated palettes. Apps like VoodooPad at least give you the option of having them in a “drawer”. Ok, so those are small points, but they’re irritating and seem easily fixable.
Who would need VisualHub? Anyone who needs to convert video to anything other than iPod formats, iSquint and iTunes are free solutions for iPod. VisualHub looks to be the best consumer level app for converting video.

Retail Price:?Ǭ† $23.32

Site: http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/

Well I’m sure everyone remembers when people where complaining that they could fry and egg on their macbooks. Now an Apple-Group memeber said that the Apple TV gets really hot. Other than the heat he was impressed.

?Ǭ†Posted on Apple-Group:

Today I to a grand opening for a local Apple store “CompNow”. It was my first chance to look at Apple TV. They were so busy selling new computers I was given the remotes & left to play away. The TV they had was a Benq HD with HDMI input. I am totally sold on Apple TV now, it does what it claims really well. Picture quality was excellent.My only concern is the very hot temp that Apple TV gets to. The shop had AC & the day was just in the 70’s. But the Apple TV was almost hot enough to boil water. On a summers day I am concerned if Apple TV will cook.They had a comp going to win an Apple TV so hopefully I will be lucky.

Apple has aired the first (apple)TV ad. I have uploaded it as a mirror in case the other go down. You can watch it here: http://iappblog.com/dropbox/appletvad.mov