720p H.264 video with 6 channel AAC audio is already appearing on the P2P sites. (Ripped from 480p DVD source… so the upscaling varies from title to title.)

It’s only the first week. Give it time. In the meanwhile, discover the world of podcasting.

But I seem to be one of the few people who notice or care that all the NBC shows that I’ve purchased are MONO. Such as “Heroes”, “30 Rock”, the free Andy Richter Pilot, etc. Technically the files are stereo, according to the results of opening in Quicktime and doing a get info. But listening to them with headphones leaves no doubt.

In contrast, Fox shows like “24″ mysteriously started being in full stereo in the middle of last years season 5, and South Park is definitely stereo. And the one movie that I bought (“8 Below”) was stereo. At least it is possible to preview a clip of each show on iTunes before buying, to determine whether a show is stereo or not.

Overall quite pleased, though the folks at the Apple store were mostly still in the dark on a lot of the features. I have a fairly large network at home with one iMAC and 5-6 XP machines all on a wired network and also wireless g available for the occasional laptop session.

Couple of comments on features that were answered incorrectly (as it turns out) at the Apple store involved access to photos on various machines on the network. Turns out that Apple TV will not stream photos, so you have to select which machine/folder you want to view photos from, and then you have to Synch that machine/folder, which means that all the photos are copied onto the 40 GB ATV drive. The implication at the store was that you could stream photos, but that is not the case. You can synch to one machine and stream from up to 5 other machines, just not photos. So if you have photos scattered out across multiple machines, you have to select which ones you want to see on TV, then synch that box/folder(s).

I will probably consolidate all the photos I have (abt 80GB worth) to one PC and move on from there.

The other quirk I noticed was that synching to a folder of jpg images (even on a MAC) produced blurry images on the AppleTV..

If however, you synch to iPhoto files on the MAC, the very same pictures are displayed at the original quality. Haven’t figured this out yet, but would be interested in any comments on this from others. Could find no reference in the manual/on-line about this difference.

Overall, setup was a snap, implementation was very well done and overall first impression is quite positive. Wireless streaming music and videos from various other PCs showed no dropouts or quality issues…