I don’t own one. I’d like to own one. But I’ve yet to figure out why I would want one north of the US/Canada border. As a Mac user I’ve grown to love Apple’s UI and stability and is now my consumer electronics usability baseline.

I’ve had HTPC plans for a couple years now but haven’t really figured out which path I want to take. The best path up until Apple TV was a Windows Media Center… but the thought of going to Windows and leaving Apple’s UI and stability has been the sole reason why I’ve yet to. Price is also an issue as it’ll take a pretty penny to get HD going smoothly with Media Center.

The next logical HTPC avenue was MythTV (Linux). I’m a geek, but a lazy geek, so for me it just has to work, with no fiddling and command line installations etc. So as powerful as it is, I’m just too lazy and short on time these days to fiddle with a Linux machine.

So when Apple TV was announced, I was excited - like most. As reviews have streamed in, I remain excited at the possibilities of this little machine. Its sleek, small, achieves HD through HDMI and component connections. Oh - best part - it runs a stripped version of OSX, so it’s damn stable.

But alas, as great as it is there are some major pitfalls (especially for anyone who’s not in the US). The biggest being no support for DivX/Xvid video formats - the most common codec at the moment. Apple is looking to strictly support only formats that iTunes supports (obviously). Well, audio is easy to get into iTunes, but video is a whole different story. Transcoding videos to h.264 will take hours and is far from ideal. This makes iTunes Store purchases the easiest way to get video on the Apple TV. I wouldn’t mind a few purchases from time to time if it was even an option in Canada - but even then why would we want to pay for video at 1/4 the resolution of ‘free’ alternatives.

Apple will DEFINITELY sell a lot more of these Apple TVs when they throw in DivX/XviD support. I think they will support these codecs - heck they let Windows (the polar opposite of all things Apple) run on their computers. So really, where’s the harm with supporting an open codec (Xvid, not DivX)?

The product is fresh off the line and I think they’re taking the conventional route and letting early adopters iron out the kinks (I would too). When they throw in that additional codec support, I’ll pick one up. I’ll even pretend to not notice the lack of DVD playback and cable tuner.

EDIT/UPDATE: Oh and I don’t count hacking AppleTV back to a plain old OSX system and running CentreStage or any other regular OSX program as enough of a reason to purchase one. If I wanted to just use OSX, I’d use my PowerBook…