Bought an ATV last week. What I think about it

Question

I hope some people at Apple are reading this, because there is definitely something that needs to be done with the AppleTV. The idea of it is great and there are some great feature in it, but almost everything turns out to be not useable or a disappointment because of details. I live in Germany where there is currently no videos we can get from the iTune store except for some bad encoded Music videos. I have a video projector that can do 720p (HDMI) and a 3 years old TV (16:9).
Since the ATV only supports HDMI and Component Video, I have to turn on the projector in order to listen to music because my TV only supports RGB and composite, I cannot believe that it is not possible per software to output composite video which is standard (actually I know that it is doable since some people hacked their ATV to do that. My amplifier only support DTS and AC3 so the quality of Dolby Pro Logic II on it is quite bad, why isn't is possible to buy/rent videos encoded with 6 discrete channels converted to standard AC3 or DTS on the fly ? I have 2 Macs with a DVD player, why isn't is possible to stream DVD content ?
On the video projector, all I could watch until now were HD 720p trailers downloaded from Quicktime, I am telling you, except for the sound, the picture is fantastic and makes you want throw your DVDs away. But today, because the software does not support much, the only thing I can do with my almost 600 $ box (it cost 399 € here) is watch my photos with the projector, watch great trailers in 720p and use it as an AppleTV Shuffle for music. I hope there will be very soon a renting service in good quality, Dolby Digital or DTS out put, Video composite out otherwise I will have to sell it on ebay and get a PS3, it would be too bad, because the design is great, the hardware is great .... Please apple do something about the software capabilities.

Answer 1

You are right, everything says on the box, and the box is great, using iTunes to organise songs and movies is also exactly what I want, but with very little doable things, it could be so much more better.
The PS3 supports most video formats H.264, Divx, Blueray, DVD, Full HD, it works with file system too it is very flexible, but will never been as easy to use and organised like an iTunes Library ...
Another example, using iLife, I make family videos of the kids, but I can't play them in a good quality on the AppleTV, because it won't support DVD images, and using Share/Quicktime/AppleTV profile, the video result is very far from the result I get with iDVD (first it does not deinterlace the video and won't give you that option, second the picture quality is not very good, and looks ugly on a 220 cm screen where the DVD looks really good. I am not complaining, I just really want the AppleTV to be a success and do what it could do with no hardware changes.