So you just got an Apple TV -- now what?

Being a typical 50+ gadget freak building monster garage w/52" & 37" Sam's on full swing Omni Mt, Yamaha 3900, Playstation, PowerBook, etc.
The last device, pos Atv to Tv, wifi.
Atv accuses me of lying about my password.
So being I can't get passed this step to see what the possibilities are, does anyone want it more than me.
This was heavily edited for those under 20.
I have to admit, the menu in HD 1080 looks great.

I have enjoyed Apple TV for about a year now. Two days ago, my hard drive died a horrible death and will have to be replaced. How can I get all my pictures and music that I've stored on my Apple TV, migrated back onto my new hard drive? There's got to be a way. Help!

Joe, to uninstall Boxee, just remove the Boxee plugin in the
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/ folder

A couple of useful links:

www.patchstick.ca offers custom development for those who are not satisfied with the current plugins

http://atvdigiframe.blogspot.com/ enables you to use your ATV as a fully functional digital picture frame

Boxee? I don't get it. I tried it, and the quality is horrific, the interface is clunky, and it won't launch unless I run updates first. There's lots of content, but mostly in clips and not many episodes, except for maybe Hulu. If I'm missing something, let me know, but I wish I knew how to uninstall it without wiping my Apple TV.

Ignore the haters. While the core readership of this blog might be more likely to already know this info, some may not and you are certainly doing a service to those who google AppleTV and are looking to get more out of it. Now, about those battery tips...

What's with the "return the ATV and get a MacMini" comments? AppleTV = $229. MacMini=$600-800. Kind of like "sell the Scion and get a Porsche, it's a lot more fun to drive." ;-)

ZeroCorpse, Your post is wrong or misleading on a few counts.

Roku has HD support - it was released last week and the software package is 1.5. Roku is promising more content from non-netflix sources. Right now Netflix's library for online and HD is horrid. There's pretty much nothing on Watch Instantly. We still use it for odd-ball foreign films and my watches a few of those retarded cop shows (CSIs) but for the most part the roku right now is bleeding edge. Little content, less in HD and nothing really flexible about it. finally, you need to at least have a netflix account right now for the roku to do anything - so minimum of $60 a year.

AppleTV as $200-300 is a bargain for some of us. Even if we buy the few shows we watch it's still exceedingly cheap. We currently spend $85 on television through Directv. We record very few shows though - 30 rock, dexter, entourage, friday night lights. A couple of those shows are available on iTunes, some on Hulu. Even if we bought all 4 on iTunes for an entire season of each show, we'd still only spend about $85 for the year. AppleTV would pay for itself in 4 months.

So you just got an Apple TV, now what? Return it.

24fps 720p limit, and useless codec support. This will never be passable as a media center. FailTV 2.0. Maybe third time is a charm.

AppleTV haters abound :)

You probably want to add a bigger drive. I did the hack seen here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=438073

I use RSS feeds and torrents to download my TV and a little workflow with VisualHub and MetaX to get the shows into iTunes. Having a large hard drive makes syncing right.

The video output is great. DVDs look perfect and down-ripped Blu-Ray discs (720p) look so good I don't feel like pulling the source discs to watch on the blu-ray player (PS3).