AirPlay Killer

ctyrider said:

Who said anything about "iTunes"? We were talking about media formats (H.264 etc), which doesn't have anything to with iTunes (which is just a media manager). If you don't like iTunes and don't want to tag your content - use something else, like Plex. But you will still be better off sticking with modern & industry standard formats like H.264/AAC, and throwing AVIs into trashbin where they belong.

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Please explain this then.

ctyrider said:

Seriously? People still use "it does't play MKV/AVI/DiVX/XviD/whatever other obscure format" as an argument against Apple TV and Apple's ecosystem?

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First off, calm down. I already gave my disclaimer that I own several aTV's and live happily within Apple's ecosystem in order to prevent people like you from overreacting over praise for a competing product.

Secondly, AppleTV doesnt natively connect to any other media managers so what Media Manager are you suggesting people use?

Third, I've already converted my old library of legacy file formats to an aTV compatible one but most people haven't. All I'm saying is that tab browsing worked as a way to shoot local video to the aTV.

Finally, Plex has never worked for me. I keep 2TB of unprotected movies/TV managed through iTunes but when Plex looks at those folders it sees less than 10% of them. So iTunes/aTV has been the best solution (in our house) for several years now.


Anyway, I really hate that this thread was labeled "Airplay Killer" because tags like that only incite people to defend rather than understand. I'm not attacking the aTV, I'm just saying that my Apple TV is going to have a new neighbor. It's not a big deal.

Slightly off-topic but does anybody know what happens when you take one of these to a different Wi-Fi network? I'm assuming you have to set it up with that network just like you did before but do you have to reset it first or will it remember both networks?

I'm going to take this to my father's house to watch some Netflix there and it would kind of stink if I had to reset it first, go through this set up at his house, then when I get back home have to set it up again at my house, then go through the whole thing again next time I bring it to my father's house. Or is it like a smartphone or tablet where once you do it once it remembers in the future?

And by the way for those wondering you can now set it up with an iOS device via a web interface. Just go to google.com/chromecast/setup on your iPhone or iPad to do so.

-PN

urkel, I know that you said that you've tried Plex before and had trouble with it (don't know what to tell you there, other than to suggest that you look for help in the Plex forums). There's apparently a way to get Plex working on the ATV via the Trailers app. I haven't gotten around to trying this yet, simply because I don't have a need for it (I've got a full-blown HTPC running the Plex client app, which is also my Plex server, in my bedroom and an Atom/ION nettop box in my living room also running the Plex client app).

I just use my ATV for Netflix, Hulu+, AirPlaying Pandora, and an occasional iTunes movie rental. But I have successfully tested out playing TV shows/movies from Plex on my iPhone and then using AirPlay to push that to the ATV.

hipnetic said:

urkel, I know that you said that you've tried Plex before and had trouble with it (don't know what to tell you there, other than to suggest that you look for help in the Plex forums). There's apparently a way to get Plex working on the ATV via the Trailers app. I haven't gotten around to trying this yet, simply because I don't have a need for it (I've got a full-blown HTPC running the Plex client app, which is also my Plex server, in my bedroom and an Atom/ION nettop box in my living room also running the Plex client app).

I just use my ATV for Netflix, Hulu+, AirPlaying Pandora, and an occasional iTunes movie rental. But I have successfully tested out playing TV shows/movies from Plex on my iPhone and then using AirPlay to push that to the ATV.

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I used to use Plex before I got sucked into the media streamer scene. It worked fine for me. Occasionally I had to manually direct it toward the correct metadata. But on the whole it worked and I thought it was a good system. iTunes also works for me. Guess I'm easy!

Rigby said:

From what I understand I don't think that will work, since Chromecast does not support MKV or AVI containers (see here). So, basically the only way to do this would be to render the video on the computer, capture the framebuffer, re-compress it to H.264, and send that to the Chromecast. But that is exactly the same as Airplay mirroring to an Apple TV.

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That's exactly how it works, except that the content is transcoded into VP8, packed in a WebM container and transmitted over WebRTC as I have understood it.

I have a c2d macbook pro and the streaming of a chrome tab playing video is very laggy. I'm pretty disappointed.