Apple TV + Flickr + HD is unreal
I’m pretty blah about my HDTV. There’s not so much content that I’m wowed all the time, SD content looks like crap, and I’ve watched enough seasons of TV shows on an elliptical trainer with my pre-Touch iPod to just think it’s a big TV. I always rave, though, when someone asks. After all, I spent $3000 on the damn thing so it damn well better rock.
But I am smitten anew and lasting. Connecting Apple TV to my girlfriend’s flickr account, I just saw her pictures from Savannah, Charleston and the Wellington Equestrian show in HD glory. The TV brought out the full resolution in a way that flickr on a computer can’t even come close to. The Ken Burns effect (which pans or zooms and pans across photos a la Ken Burns Civil War and other documentaries), sometime mucks things up, but usually does a great job of keeping it lively, making familiar pictures fresh, and enlivening dull pictures.
One of my favorite flickr’ers is Magic Fly Paula, a woman about whom I know nothing aside from that she lives in Portugal, and has cool sets like Invisible Cities, Imaginary Libraries, Imaginary Books, Star Diaries. Much of her work is photoshopped and there’s a mix of Jules Verne (wood and brass) and Umberto Eco (philology and polymath wordplay) and Calvino (fantastical).
So I put her photostream on my HDTV with Renaissance era masses and chants and it was incredible. I looked at J-Rube’s slides from Ecuador and got a great travelogue.
They just need to connect it to the interestingness feed, or the popular or most recent feed and it would be perfect. (Perphaps that’s a project for me to work-around.)
Even though my projector is right next to my computer (so I can hook them up easily) I am also eye’ing on this Apple TV number…. For the UI.
The Flickr on HD action sounds promising. Should I loko into it more?
Cheers,
See-ming
I haven’t looked carefully into whether Apple TV handles the photos and the HD signal better than a computer hooked up to the TV, so I can’t say for sure. But looking at Flickr pics on HD made the purchase worth it — it’s a combination of higher quality viewing, pacing the slideshow, and even the music.
The HD movie rentals and the TV access are pretty cool as well.
[…] Another thing to do with pictures that makes any set of pictures look awesome: Piclens from Cooliris. Piclens is a Firefox add-on that does two things: 1) grabs all the pictures contained in or implied by a page (contained in is just what it sounds like, implied by is grabbing a photostream on Flickr); and 2) displays them on a cool Matrix (architect scene) wall that you can scrub through. It handles loads really well. The pic above is the Library of Congress photostream on Flickr. […]