Apple TV owners' thread. - Page 7

Is the router wireless? Set the atv to dhcp (probably already there) and unplug the Ethernet cable. It should then just work. If the router is wireless N then there shouldn't be a big advantage using wired 100mbs ( the ATV Ethernet is not gigabit so you won't be able to get the gigabit advantage- true for almost every media player). If you can use the 5Ghz band, if available. The reason for trying wireless first is that you can rule out problems with the network topology, since you have a switch and a router.

It's probably a firewall thing. I have several switches and a couple of wireless access points. The ATV just worked.

Philip

+ve:
* Amazing Size!
* Low Power Pull
* Fantastically Easy Setup - Only deliberation was if to pass it through the AVR, I opted not to
* Easy Setup With Harmony Remote 'Activities'
* Love the NetFlix Interface
* MobileMe Integration is tops, videos are really nice and seems to stream fastset from here
* YouTube Streaming is entirely dependent on what Videos you watch in terms of streaming speed.
* Podcasts works well
* Not obvious, but "In Theaters" is a portal to trailers.
* Does not 'sucker-click' you into purchasing episodes, there is clearly a "Preview" and a "Rent" Available. With preview as the default selected.

-ves
* There seems to be some sort of bug that makes the ATV forget your WiFi credentials when you manually put it to sleep (and some report even when it puts itself to sleep)
* Homegroup Sharing seems to be spotty and does not happen all the time. One thing that seems to help is if you update iTunes to latest version 10.0.1 I think and reboot TWICE. It will stick for a bit.
* Inputting credentials via the non-qwerty sliding box selectors gets old fast. Why can't I just plug the IP into a browser and configure the whole thing there?
* I checked with my TiVo and my PC and PS3; there seems to be much more variance in loudness between these devices. Not sure what the technical term is bit loud is extremely loud on the ATV2 compared to the other devices, may be an issue with the sound setup on my end bit I will keep looking.
* iTunes U missing
* No "Buy" Button, only "Rent" to buy you have to buy on your Mac/PC; download and share through home sharing.

Based on first impressions.

Reset my cable modem & it's all good in da 'hood.

Once again, it just works. How does apple do this over & over. I wish that other companies in other industries would adopt this philosophy. Tversity, ps3 media, etc are fine but the abilty to pay a "sawbuck" & have (among other things) apple trailers work in Dolby Pro Logic with nary a configurtion change/selection on my part is almost priceless.

lovswr, a sawbuck is $10. The Apple TV costs a Benjamin.

trinifox, I've read of others having similar problems with the Apple TV losing connection to the network after awaking from sleep, but I've not had that sort of problem. What kind of router do you have? I upgraded my router to an Apple AirPort Extreme a few weeks back.

Have you tried the remote app on an iDevice? It's very nice.

philip

I don't think it works that way. The video is decoded on your iPhone or iPad. It just sends the 1s and 0s to your Apple TV for display on your big screen HDTV. The Apple TV isn't doing the decoding which is why any app should work. In fact, it has already been confirmed that of the list you mentioned ABC, Vevo, and Slingplayer definitely do work over Airplay with audio right now. If DRM was an issue, audio wouldn't play either.

EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION: In any case, I could be wrong about which device exactly is doing the decoding, but since the audio of the aforementioned apps do play over Airplay right now, then that is reason enough to believe that any sort of DRM won't be a problem. The bottom line is if the video plays on the iPhone or iPad using the built in video player that 99% of apps already use today, then you should be able to watch the video on your Apple TV connected HDTV by just clicking the Airplay button on your iPhone or iPad.

Certainly not by any means a barometer of actual sales however at my local Fry's (typically my lunch time walk) the Apple TV is kicking butt. Two Saturdays ago they had a dozen or so and sold out the same day. Last Friday they had roughly the same amount and again sold out the same day.

A week or so earlier they stocked the Netgear Roku XD and have sold three or four since then with a return or two thrown in. Now I know where they place the overstock so I don't think they have restocked either outside of receiving the second Apple TV shipment. This week they have the Netgear Roku XD on sale for $79… instead of the usual $90.

The same seems to be happening in Toronto at the Apple stores. They get them in mornings and they are all gone by 3pm. I have been looking for a 2nd one since the 1st was co-opted ... Looks like on-line may be the best bet. I would like to get it before they come out with Airplay as I think that will cause a stampede.

The reception from Toronto with NetFlix is fantastic, and the integration is very nice. My only suggestion would be to add a volume control to the remote app, if possible.

My original plan was to get an ATV and pre-order another type of player. Instead I cancelled the other and am getting two ATV's. It's not that the other players are not interesting, but they are in a chaotic state of flux. I already have a PCH C200 which works fine, although it doesn't seem to be progressing other than making things stable.

Netgear seems to have an interesting product on paper with the 550. They don't appear to support Bonjour, nor AFP, nor HFS+. Very PC oriented and little attention payed to integration with the iDevice world. I didn't realize they made the Roku players.

Philip

I'm sure they don't. Roku is using Netgear for retail distribution which makes a lot of sense. The package (Netgear Roku XD NVT250) is branded with Netgear and Roku.

http://www.frys.com/product/6411602?...H:MAIN_RSLT_PG

As I've previously mentioned, I fully expect the Apple TV to be a huge seller, thanks to the fact that many existing iOS device owners (and there's over 120 million iOS devices sold) will see at least $99 worth of value in it. I'm slightly surprised that it appears to be selling so quickly already, though, since they haven't even started advertising it yet (I expect to see it featured in commercials once AirPlay is released - which will be right around the Holiday shopping season).

Am I missing something? I don't seem to be able to use AirPlay for audio from either my iPhone4 or the iPad. Do you have to do something special?


philip

Isn't the holiday season around Christmas or is it Thanksgiving in the US?

philip

My experiences with 1080p mkvs on the new aTV..

Found a free/opensource prog (google mkv/avi to mp4) that would take my 1080p mkv- and basically demux, convert audio to aac (doesn't touch the video) and remux into an mp4-- it will even change/hack the profile to 3.1 so that itunes won't complain about importing into your library.. This program worked as advertised and I now had a couple of 1080p mp4's to test.

One of the vids had been run through handbrake- the other had not so it was the original untouched avc/264.. This untouched one played but was very touchy- forget about FF/REW, etc and some noticeable "judder" if that describes it correctly (vid would slow down a tad and catch up every few secs)..

The second 1080p vid (that had been run through handbrake high profile)- played much better, but I can't say it was spot on perfect.. Every so often there would be a minimal judder that many prob wouldn't even recognize- but I did.. And it actually seemed to get worse when the movie had fully buffered --I had paused the movie for about 45 mins to go back to football- and when I switched back over and unpaused the judder was way more significant even though it appeared that the movie had fully buffered at that point..

In the end- imo I don't think 1080p is worth it yet until someone with more time than me comes up with a better process for getting them to play smoothly. For now- I guess I'm going to go with having double encodes for "aTV approved media" (720p).. Kind of a bummer, but I still hold some hope that we'll get 1080 rocking on this thing eventually.

I truly wanted to be an "owner" since my requirements are quite simple but it wasn't meant to be.

I really only wanted it for picture slideshows and Netflix access with any additional functionality I might use being a bonus and the price was certainly right.

Alas the lack of support for NAS users kills it for me. I'm sure someone will hack it and make NAS useable to some degree, but the lack of that functionality kills it for me.

The user interface is really important for many people and Apple pretty much has that down almost pat. I'm an upper intermediate to lower advanced techno geek(to use a skiing analogy) and have no problems using the horrid network interface on my AV processor, but wouldn't want to put anyone else through that.

Here's hoping NAS use will be enabled at a later date.

It does seem like it wouldn't be a big deal for them to add support for simpler network shares for photos, but will there be a large number of people who only use their NAS for that, or will many of them also want to access MP3's and videos from their NAS? If the latter, I can sort of see why Apple might want to push for requiring iTunes, because iTunes acts as the keeper of the metadata (thumbnails, movie rating, description, etc.). And since they're largely catering to the non-geek, it's a lot easier to explain to a non-geek that if you import your music and movies into iTunes, it will "take care of the rest" as opposed to training them on the details of obtaining their own metadata, coverart, etc., and the proper naming conventions.

One possibility I could see is Apple enhancing the AirPort Extreme so that it runs some sort of iTunes "lite".

In other news, I rented an HD movie last night that my father-in-law had been wanting to see. The local video store didn't have the Blu-ray in-stock, and it's still on delayed release to Redbox. Normally I would still just wait for it to come to one of those sources, but I figured I'd test out the iTunes rental process one time just to see how quickly I could start up the movie and whether I experienced any pauses (due to hitting the end of the buffer), stuttering, or other issues. The movie was ready to go within a minute or so (I have about 14Mbps download speed), and everything worked fine.

Today, my 2nd Apple TV arrived (Amazon order during the brief window of time that they were available there), which will be for my daughter's room. She's 12 so I decided to try out some of the parental controls. I was able to set rating limits for Movies and TV Shows, and I set "Explicit Music & Podcasts" to "Ask". But I was very disappointed to see that I couldn't set the rating limits for Netflix. I could completely disable Netflix access or set it to "Ask" (which would mean that I would need to enter a passcode to temporarily open up access to it), but neither of those is very good, as I want her to have easy access to family-friendly content on Netflix. Oh well.

Funny you should mention that as my NAS has an Itunes server built in at the factory.

But aside from that I'm perfectly willing to live with the current ATV supported codecs etc... I just don't want to have to turn on my PC to access my media files.

The entire reason I own a NAS and Sonos was because I didn't want to have to turn on my PC and a huge power hungry display to access my music files.

The Sonos UI is exceptional as is all of the Apple products I've used. Just give me NAS access and I'm sold.

I recently ordered the New Apple TV and I would like to know if it is compatible with my Logitech Harmony 700 remote?

Can't answer that but what I can tell you is that if you have another idevice ie iPod/iPhone/iPad forget about the harmony and download the remote app...

Yep.

I think this is a valid issue and I'd wish they addressed it. Ideally Apple would supply iTunes for Linux ( which powers most of these devices) but that doesn't seem to be a priority, unfortunately.

I have a new Mini server as well as a bunch of NAS units. The Mini in fact uses less power than my NAS units and its iTunes collects everything from the various NAS units ( and a WHS) which then feeds things to wherever. In a sense this allows for the ATV to be simultaneously connected to many sources, something which is not usual with media players.It works great, but it's not a short term fix. I've been using Minis for years. The current one is totally silent, fast, has hdmi and is just a joy to use.

The alternative you might want to think about is a WHS ( Windows Home Server). Acer makes an inexpensive one which is surprisingly nice and not power hungry. You can install iTunes on it but that's not a supported method and I have yet to try installing the latest. iTunes won't run as a service so there's that issue.

It's unfortunate as the ATV is a great way to display photos.

philip

What was the bitrate? Were you using a wired connection? I seem to be able to play pretty well any 720p video I can throw at it. Until my other TV arrives I won't be able to test more.

Are you talking about the utility that deals with making things playable on an Xbox/PS3?

philip

Wired connection- yea 720p videos are fine.. I'll need to check the bitrates but they were both pretty high I'm sure, one more than the other as it was uncompressed bd rip and the 2nd one (that played better) was a bd rip that was run through handbrake..

The utility is literally called "mkv/avi to mp4" I believe

Is this 8 GB buffer, unique to AppleTV among the boxes? Do none of the others offer this? Hmmm....

can anyone tell me if I can used as a wireless bridge to connect my directtv hd dvr to the internet for on demand and app use?

I doubt that i can but i thought it would be nice if it could as I could speed $99 for apple tv for netflix and music streaming and ondemand and apps through directtv.

If all else fails i can still hope that the new directivo box comes out soon....supposed to be this year....supposedly.

As far as standalone streamers, I think it may be. I know that XBMC has some preference settings related to buffer size, but I don't *think* you can set it high enough to store an entire movie, though I've recently been intrigued enough by Apple's implementation that I'm planning to look into this. It actually should be fairly easy for them to implement this sort of functionality into XBMC since many people are using PC's (with hard drives) as their streamers.

Back to Apple...I've posted this previously, but I'll say it again...I know that many people won't be happy about this, but I think this 8GB buffer really is there to maximize stutter/pause-free video playback, and *not* for app store expandability. The average 720p iTunes movie seems to be about 4GB or less, so there's still ample storage to accommodate both a single movie fully buffered *and* several apps. But if some of that buffer is also being used for metadata/thumbnail buffering and future firmware expandability, that doesn't leave a whole lot free for user-chosen app downloads.

Instead (and I've said this previously as well), I think Apple might expand upon the AirPlay concept such that they'll provide APIs to allow for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch apps which are Apple TV-aware whereby you download the app onto your iPhone (or whatever iOS mobile device) and when you want to use it with your Apple TV, it will temporarily upload a copy (or part) of the app to the Apple TV, which will run an Apple TV-optimized GUI with the iOS device serving as a controller.

Anyone else having probs with home shares not showing up on the atv? My laptop and windows desktop are showing up under "computers" but not the other library which is a Mac desktop.. I'm signed into the same home sharing account on all pc's and all of the itunes versions are 10.0.1, but the third one won't show up.. Tried a million things and no luck so far- drivin me crazy

@Scott, the thing is the Apple TV has 16GB of storage. Most apps are a megabyte or two. I'm not overly worried they can support apps, especially since if an app store comes, it'll be for TV-logical apps only. I doubt you'd want 500 of them, but if you did, there'd probably be room.

No, just 8GB:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple...eardown/3625/1

But, yes, even with 8GB, you could probably fit several apps on it and still have plenty of room for buffer space, caching of metadata, etc.

OK, my memory is faulty. That said, there is really never a need for even 4GB of caching -- that's pure luxury given that if you rapidly cached even 1-2GB you could have a substantial data outage and still stay well ahead of the viewer.

And really, you can fit 500 apps into a single gigabyte.

Your point about metadata is interesting, I wonder how much caching it will do. I suppose that could take up some space, but again, even 10,000 songs, shows and movies doesn't sound like nearly 1GB of metadata. More like 50-100MB.