Consider a Roku. I recommend the Roku 2 XS (1080P video and a USB port so you can connect up a drive with video).
Dude, I know this is the apple board but get a Windows HTPC. I'm typing this on a 50" 1080p plasma with the DPI at 150 and everything looks great and is readable from 8 feet away.
a combo of unblock us and any of the online sports packs can solve this problem. thats what i do atleast for basketball and footballI haven't had cable in 3 years. The AppleTV with Netflix suits me just fine. Once you have gone a good amount of time without cable, the stuff on Netflix is great! If you are into your local sports teams, it can be tough because there is no way to pay for those games without cable. I use a slingbox at my parents house for this purpose, but in my opinion, sports is really all cable has anymore.
There's a couple things I just don't understand about the Smart TVs... Why do I want a browser on my TV? I mean for content, yes. For reading? No. I use an app for my keyboard / mouse to control my PC hooked up to my TV. I use it for Windows PC gaming, Plex, Netflix, AirPlay (AirServer http://www.airserverapp.com/ ) and managing my Linux server. Though I mainly do that from my MBA as it sits closer and more enjoyable to read from. I only have live TV cause it's included with the rent.I returned my Apple TV and picked up a Mac Mini.
Sadly, it wasn't that great either. The resolution and text on the screen were poor. I managed to fix the resolution, but the text was just too choppy (I read other posts that said that's a common issue--it was hard to read from the couch). I used an HDMI-HDMI connection with a 1080p resolution.
Netflix and Apple trailers, both in HD, still had a bit of pixelation in full screen. I used ethernet, and it was still "off" in terms of HD quality.
I think I may look into downgrading our cable package for now, and perhaps new offerings will come out in the next year.
a combo of unblock us and any of the online sports packs can solve this problem. thats what i do atleast for basketball and football
i highly recommend it. being a student i find that a sports pack is not only expensive, but becomes useless when i travel home. so if i go home for a couple weekends in the winter, i end up missing many football games im paying for. but with an app and apple tv, i get the game whoever i go (my family has an ATV at a couple tis)This looks cool. Come baseball season, I'll be trying this out.
General purpose computing on a TV from a couch just plain sucks especially on only a screen that small and that far away. Heck, I don't even like doing it on my 120" screen in my theater, no what DPI setting I use. If I want to do that sort of thing on a couch, a laptop is much better.
I've been using my htpc to browse the web, watch videos, xbmc, windows media center, ect for years.
Same here. Been doing the HTPC thing for around 8 years now. When it comes to browsing the web from a couch, I'll take an iPad/laptop any day over a computer hooked up to a TV regardless of screen size, viewing distance, DPI settings, etc.
I use a slingbox at my parents house for this purpose, but in my opinion, sports is really all cable has anymore.
Ok. How would Slingbox at my parents house work? We cut the cord in August and the only negative is not having the Speed channel for Live Supercross.
They have cable and the Speed channel.
I put the slingbox at my parents and I use the iPad app to watch TV and to AirPlay to an AppleTV. Picture quality will depend on your upload speed. And you will need a cable tuner now that there is no slingbox with a built in tuner. Mine isn't even hooked up to a TV. But since the new models don't have a tuner, you will need a cable box. Which is a monthly expense unless they have a little used TV you can hook it up to.
If you do, please let me know how you like it.I am considering getting a Roku to see how it runs PLEX.
If you do, please let me know how you like it.
What are the filetypes of the videos you're playing (e.g., high-bitrate Blu-ray .mkv rips, etc.)?
If you do, please let me know how you like it.
* I want the controls to work like Plex where I can skip forward 30 seconds and back 10 easily.
*I want to view an entire screen-full of Movies to choose from instead of about half a screen. Once you have a few hundred movies, it takes forever to scroll through the interface on the ATV3.
*I would like to be able to separate Kids TV & Kids Movies from Non-kids Movies & Non-kids TV without giving them all a generic Genre assignment (Non-Kid for example) that would never allow to search by Action, Comedy, etc.
Lastly (And most importantly to me)
*I want the TV Shows section to list the TV Show Series and then be able to click down to the list of seasons. . I have seen people discuss ways around this, but it either takes a lot of work to re-label each TV episode or has some other drawback I don't like.
You CAN do this if you use the ATV's "learn remote" feature. The skip ahead/back functions give you 30 second skip ahead and 10 second skip back (during the learning process they look like clockwise/counterclockwise symbols). I agree that these functions ought to be defaulted into the packaged ATV remote. As it stands, I recommend that everyone just use the learn-remote function and use your favorite universal remote.
What I do, personally, is use a Logitech Harmony 300i (it's only about $30 online). I DON'T use the Apple TV or Apple Computer device function sets in Logitech's database. They are too limited. Instead I "program" it with the Tivo settings on myharmony.com, just so I can get tons of button functions that won't control my other AV devices (I don't own a Tivo). Then I use the ATV's "learn remote" feature to set the remote's button functions to do exactly what I want.
An odd workaround, I know, but once it is set up you can get the ATV to behave exactly how you want.
Agreed this would be good. At least they should give you some options for how your ATV content is displayed. ("choose full-screen OR vertical list with previews on the side").
Also agreed. It think what would be ideal would be some sort of "suitable for kids" checkbox in the iTunes tags, separate from the "genres". Then the parents can arbitrarily decide which content they want classified as "for kids" and not.
Are you sure this doesn't work already? Both "Series" and "Season" have tags in iTunes.. . are you saying Apple TV doesn't respect those iTunes tags?
Anyway, the simple workaround for this is to simply designate each TV Show SEASON as a separate SERIES. So I'd have "Star Trek: Season 1" as a separate SERIES from "Star Trek: Season 2". And you'd see them listed separately on the ATV.
I'm pretty sure this is how it works when you buy multiple seasons of a show from the iTunes store.
My EyeTV software does this automatically when it exports to iTunes. For example, we record Sesame Street for the kids from PBS. Sometimes we get current season, sometimes there are reruns from previous seasons. So when they finally get transcoded from EyeTV to iTunes, on my Apple TV, I see "Sesame Street Season 43" as a separate menu item from "Sesame Street Season 42". And selecting either will let me drill down to see all the recorded episodes within that season.
The only problem with this is that the videos purchased through iTunes is protected and doesn't show up properly in PLEX. Otherwise, I am pretty happy with the setup. I have access to my media through iTunes and PLEX as needed.
Have you looked into Beamer.app? Works very well for streaming .mkv and other formats to any Apple TV3. In my case, works way better than Airplay since it's optimized for video.
There's a 15 min trail as well. I'm very satisfied with it.
Link:
http://beamer-app.com/