Apple Inc. has graced the public with another smooth, white, exquisitely designed gadget, this time aiming at making it easier to play iTunes movies and songs on the living-room TV set.

Too bad, then, that where looks really matter - in the quality of the video on the TV screen - the $299 Apple TV comes up very short. It's as if Apple had launched an iPod that sounded like a cassette player.

The Apple TV is a square device the size of a hardback book that goes in your entertainment center. You connect it to your TV set via cables (not included). It also connects to your Mac or Windows computer, wirelessly or via cable.

Once set up, the Apple TV can play the contents of the computer's iTunes library on the TV set, whether it's music, podcasts, videos, TV shows or movies. It can also show your photos. XP is the only Windows flavor officially supported by Apple, but I connected to a PC running Vista with no problems.

There's a 40-gigabyte hard drive in the Apple TV. It will automatically copy over as much as it can from the iTunes library, so you can access your media when the computer is off. The hard drive doesn't make the Apple TV a TiVo: It doesn't record live TV.

On the TV screen, the Apple TV projects a very iPod-like interface, commendably clear and easy to use. It also looks great, especially on a high-definition TV. It uses your own pictures as an animated screensaver.

Speaking of HDTV, you more or less need one of those sets for the Apple TV. It's not designed to connect via the older single-lead RCA video cable. You need a TV that takes either the three-lead component cable (the jacks are usually colored red, green and blue) or the all-digital HDMI cable. Newer standard-definition sets may have component inputs, but most TVs out there don't.

It's surprising, then, that videos from Apple's online iTunes store look horrible on an HDTV set. The movies and TV shows have the same nominal resolution as DVDs, but look much blurrier, approaching the look of standard-definition broadcast TV.

To make it worse, these barely watchable movies aren't cheap. "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" costs $15 on iTunes, almost as much as the DVD. TV episodes are more reasonably priced, at $2 each.

It's possible to convert home footage shot with high-definition video cameras to play on the Apple TV, but not in their native resolution, so some quality is lost even there.

After the Apple TV's menus, the Xbox interface is like a slap in the face. It's garish and confusing, and you have to press more buttons to get where you want to go.

The Xbox does your HDTV justice, though. Microsoft's Xbox Live marketplace has some movies in HD, and these look absolutely stunning - almost indistinguishable from HD DVD or Blu-ray discs. Even standard-definition fare on Xbox Live looks much better than iTunes movies.

The Xbox hard drive is half as large as the Apple TV's, though that's less of an issue when you rent movies rather than buying them. The movies can be watched only on the Xbox, while Apple's movies can be viewed on a computer or iPod screen as well.

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