While the AppleTV looks like it’s a pretty neat device, the jury’s still out for me on wether or not I’m going to pick one up. While it has a super-sexy form factor, the reality is that I already have an XBox 360 powering the home theater and without MPEG2 or AC3 support, I won’t be replacing that with an AppleTV any time soon.

But the more I think of it, the less I like the idea of having these ‘extender’ boxes on each TV. Let’s face it – AppleTV is basically an extender for iTunes, much in the same way many of the MCE extenders are for Media Center.

I would have been much happier if Apple just released an iPod High Definition docking cradle. Imagine an enhanced video dock that had component, HDMI, optical audio and S-Video output that I could walk up to and just drop my iPod into. Put the iPod interface onto the TV with a CoverFlow UI, and that’s all I would have ever needed. Heck, I’d buy a dock for every TV then.

Update: DWAnderson posted up on his blog about this. I’m not suggesting that the ’super iPod dock’ is in any way a replacement for a Windows Media Server (which if you’ve read the goat for awhile, you know I’ve been doing this for years). My point is that codec hell still exists. I would love to just have all my media sitting on a 2TB NAS w/ a UPNP server that the 360, Macs, PC’s, and TiVo’s all just worked with, totally eliminating the need for extenders, transcoders, a dedicated server box, etc.

But until a video codec standard emerges (I think H.264 will be the winner), much in the same way MP3 took over audio, this is just a painful (and doesn’t have a very high WAF) experience for delivering content around the house.