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Apple Announces tvOS 27 With These New Features
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Why do you all need/want audio and video passthrough? Or processing of more codecs? Am I missing something? I connect my apple tv 4k directly to the TV, and all my other devices to the receiver, so the ATV has nothing to do with the signals coming from my disc player or my console and everything plays fine, my Tv gets the correct Dolby Vision or HDR10 signals and the receiver gets the correct dolby atmos, dts, PCM, etc. accordingly, from whatever device is currently playing.
I connect mine directly to the TV, no receiver involved. The fact of the matter is codecs aren't frozen in 2022 (2020/21 in terms of development, really). Eventually, some vendor is going to (let's say) push just HDR10+ through their app, and it's going to break for us.
Further, you and I might not use a receiver in the Apple TV to TV chain, but why dismiss those who do? Receivers are commonplace—of course you want passthrough in that sort of case (especially if it's a high-end receiver). If it's an industry standard feature on Roku devices, then why isn't it on the Apple TV?
CarlJ
Contributor
I don't personally use it this way, but I believe it's the reason people keep asking - video (like movies and shows) that you stream from a streaming service's app will necessarily be in the right format, but there are also apps, like Infuse and VLC that will let you stream from practically any applicable source.
A common use is with a file server in your home (NAS, etc.), which may contain copies of movies you've ripped from DVDs or BluRays. Some people have large collections of these (not quite the same but I have a number of friends who have ripped their entire CD collections to a home file server, so they have access to all their music - including out-of-print recordings you won't find to stream anywhere).
If you've got a collection of movies on your server that have soundtracks in, say, both a lossy Dolby format and a lossless DTS format (or maybe one format has more discrete channels than the other), and you want to stream those through your Apple TV, and your home theater system can play DTS just fine, you run into the problem that Apple TV won't deal with DTS and will give you the Dolby soundtrack instead. So, people want "audio passthrough" - like, Apple, you don't have to understand this data, just pass it from the input (app reading from server) to the output (the HDMI cable to your home theater system).
That's how you come up against formats that Apple TV can't handle that people want it to just pass along.
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Justin Cymbal
macrumors 6502a
THIS ⬆️👌😎
This is what we all (really) care about 😌 at the end of the day
Faster AirPlay (for me) is a huge plus. On existing hardware too = 👌
I pretty much ONLY use my Apple TV for 3 things nowadays:
AirPlay, my Pre ~2010 (to 2015) movie collection 🍿 that I bought on iTunes over the years (over 950 of them) and MLB.tv the only sport that I really pay much attention to anymore, I get that for free every year too thru the T-Mobile promotion that they run every year so no ongoing subscriptions 😎
Attachments
McWetty
macrumors 6502a
This is all I want. Nothing else. Just bitstream support.
In my opinion, the most important feature of all would be the ability to enable restrictions only for children’s accounts. Right now, either everyone gets the restrictions or no one does. As a parent, it’s annoying to have to constantly enter a code. And the App Store doesn’t even show you all the apps anymore when app restrictions are active. It’s crazy. Doesn’t anyone at Apple have kids?
Maybe this feature will come when our kids are grown up and we no longer need it. I’m still hoping that it will be included in tVOS, but it just hasn’t been announced yet.
groove-agent
macrumors 68020
How about not having to choose a user when you start tvOS, then having to select again in each app? It should just choose the last person logged, or allow you to choose the bahaviour of the auto user selection.
- Select or unselect Lossless. Apple TV 4K currently doesn’t support Hi-Res Lossless (sample rates greater than 48 kHz).
somethingelsefl
macrumors 6502
why can’t TVos have the same widgets that run on iOS, CarPlay and MacOS? It would need useful to have a swipe left widget screen like CarPlay that I can have running a lot of the time.
How about an Apple TV that doesn't decode every bit of audio and re-encode it as PCM? You know--true passthrough and real DSP. That would be nicer than a podcast app that has been redesigned for no apparent reason.
Fix the terrible remote. Hard to use. click a button and it jumps to pick something else. Too clever by half.
OK, now I get it, indeed if I wanted to do that and the ATV wouldn't handle those formats I would be annoyed too. When I read about passthrough I always assume it's passing the signals from hardware level input to output, never thought about software-to-hardware output passthrough. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
I’ve never had issues with apps updating automatically. May just need to reset and re-log in to your apple tv?
Even the new remote that ditched the touchpad? I’ve never used it but figured that would resolve that issue.
CarlJ
Contributor
Yeah, that would be ideal. For YouTube, specifically, I tend to pause the video on my Apple TV, pick up my iPad, open the YouTube app (often it'll have the same video, at about the same time offset, in the corner - otherwise it's in my watch history), locate the same spot, go full screen, and screenshot that. But that's an awful lot of hoops to jump through when it's be so much nicer to hit a couple keys on the remote and have it just automatically upload to my camera roll.
And some other streaming apps will blank the screen when they detect a screenshot (come on guys, I'm not going to steal a movie by taking 3500 screenshots and stitching them together, I just want an image of this one scene or graph or whatever to explain something to a friend).
I seem to recall running into a button combination on the remote, many years ago, that would take a screenshot, but it was intended for developing Apple TV apps, and would only make the screenshot available to a connected Mac with Xcode running (or some such setup - I never bothered to track it down).
CarlJ
Contributor
Weird. It's my favorite remote control ever. All the buttons you need, none that you don't, easy to use one-handed without looking or having to reach over lots of irrelevant buttons.
The only place I've ever had problems with the remote selecting wrong things is in the YouTube app, but that's entirely YouTube's fault.
BotchQue
macrumors 65816
Yay, I'm not the only one!
My workaround is to Pause the TV feed (EweTube TV), grab my iPhone, hit Camera, zoom so the TV screen essentially fills the frame, then hit Play and back up 15 seconds (on Pause, the pic is dimmed and a bunch of bars cover everything up); take a photo at the right time, Airplay it to my Macbook, adjust, bla-bla-bla.
Double-clicking a button, or double-hitting two buttons on the AppleTV remote, having a screenshot transferred to Photos, pre-formatted per my specs, would be the cat's meow. Hopefully soon!
I would love the ability to organize movies into my own folders. For example, I bought a Mystery Science Theater 3000 box set (50 films / $50) and now all the MST3K movies are sprinkled about my library. I would love to move them all to a folder.
Seems like a simple request, right? Sent it to Apple. No reply.
Seems like a simple request, right? Sent it to Apple. No reply.
Pluto TV's use of the Apple TV Remote and tvOS navigation is pretty hacky too. Frustrating since we love Pluto TV otherwise.
sjsharksfan12
macrumors 68030
Pluto TV has changed their app in frustrating ways. They are trying to get rid of the guide, but the guide has been the best part. I can still get to it but it's a lot harder than it was a few years ago.
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