Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Introduces New Apple TV Set-Top Box with 1080p Video and Updated Interface
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Airplay Mirroring
I thought I read somewhere that you will be able to use the AppleTV to show your MacBook display on your flatscreen? Would the sound output through the AppleTV as well? Anyone have any thoughts on this? It would be very similar to the Intel wireless display feature. I'm just curious if my i7 MacBook Air would be compatible with this feature when Mountain Lion comes out... It's a bit early to speculate I suppose but it would be cool if someone has an idea.
I thought I read somewhere that you will be able to use the AppleTV to show your MacBook display on your flatscreen? Would the sound output through the AppleTV as well? Anyone have any thoughts on this? It would be very similar to the Intel wireless display feature. I'm just curious if my i7 MacBook Air would be compatible with this feature when Mountain Lion comes out... It's a bit early to speculate I suppose but it would be cool if someone has an idea.
I think it will work with all i core processors (Intel Core i5, i7, etc. Think it's called sandy bridge?)
Yea they are called sandy bridge. I know all the windows 7 i's do it... I hope so! that will be worth the purchase to me. I checked apple's website and it shows it with a macbook air so I'm pretty positive it does. Yesssssssssssssss
Last edited:
APPLE TV upgrade
Last night I upgraded my Apple TV(2nd generation). The screen format has been changed to the same as shown in this article. My question is, if the only upgrade is from 720 to 1080 is it really worth it to buy the new one? I find it hard to tell the difference between the two anyway. Any thoughts?
Last night I upgraded my Apple TV(2nd generation). The screen format has been changed to the same as shown in this article. My question is, if the only upgrade is from 720 to 1080 is it really worth it to buy the new one? I find it hard to tell the difference between the two anyway. Any thoughts?
If you have or are planning to get a 1080p TV, then you might want to upgrade.
I have a 720p TV with no plans to upgrade, so I'm passing on ATV3. I'll just put the $100 I save towards a new iMac when the new ones are released.
Given the low-powered CPU, I think it's safe to assume we won't be seeing any video game controllers that let it run iOS games designed for the iPod Touch and iPad any time soon.
I see they now list support to play .AVI videos. That's a first. It's one of the reasons I had to put XBMC on my 1st Gen AppleTV.
I see they still don't offer any support directly for DTS Audio. I keep hoping they'll update the .M4V container to support it. I'd like to convert my DTS DVDs over but have to use XBMC and MKV to do it currently. Support for the newer Blu-Ray audio formats would be nice as well. I still don't like the lack of analog audio out on the thing since Version 2.0. I have at least one room that is all analog audio and it means I'd have to buy an external DAC to use it there.
Not bloody likely. Older sets that only had 1080i (like rear-projection CRT HDTVs) were not designed to handle 1080p input. Many didn't even have HDMI inputs on them and without it, it's IMPOSSIBLE to even send a 1080p signal to the set as component doesn't have enough bandwidth to handle it.
For example, my mother has my old 57" Panasonic rear-projection HDTV from 1999 (it's the one that does real 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i) and it doesn't have HDMI inputs, only component (works fine with Gen1 AppleTV which offered component and 1080i output).
Gen1 AppleTV had a simple video output preference option and you could convert up/down to any output you needed. I don't know why they wouldn't offer such a basic feature here unless, of course the chip doesn't support it. But then there's no component support here either so if you have HDMI, you likely have a set that can convert 1080p down if needed anyway. If you only have component, you'll have to get a 2nd hand Gen1 AppleTV. They still rent movies in 720p just fine and can output/convert the signal to 1080i if needed.
Last edited:
I've updated both too, and since encountering this bug done a full restore of ATV2 but its still doing it. I've encountering similar bugs over the last 15 months of owning it when either the ATV2 or iTunes has an updated, so expecting 5.0.1 OS soon lol
----------
Have you updated iTunes along with your ATV2?
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B179 Safari/7534.48.3)
Actually yes it has a beautiful direct interface for podcasts. I love watching the TWIT Network shows with Leo Laporte and friends. It is basically Tech TV from cable reborn and with more and better shows.
DBDukes said:
Actually yes it has a beautiful direct interface for podcasts. I love watching the TWIT Network shows with Leo Laporte and friends. It is basically Tech TV from cable reborn and with more and better shows.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B179 Safari/7534.48.3)
Actually yes it has a beautiful direct interface for podcasts. I love watching the TWIT Network shows with Leo Laporte and friends. It is basically Tech TV from cable reborn and with more and better shows.
DBDukes said:
Actually yes it has a beautiful direct interface for podcasts. I love watching the TWIT Network shows with Leo Laporte and friends. It is basically Tech TV from cable reborn and with more and better shows.
Does it say somewhere how much local storage there is (e.g. for podcasts)? I don't see that anywhere in the announcement.
New UI is terrible
Honestly, I couldn't agree with you more. This is a terrible step backwards! Imagine designing a UI on this device that hides some icons/content "below the fold" (in other words, makes me need to scroll).
The old interface was concise, easy to use, fast & complete. It lacked features (like being able to customize or remove unused items).
The new UI appears to be targeted at always displaying content that can be purchased from iTunes. Yet another marketing ploy for the most expensive content provider on the planet.
<Aside>
I thought I'd give it a try -- but at $3.49 for a single half-hour episode of a sitcom? Is this really a price-point that iTunes consumers are willing to pay? Certainly not me.
</Aside>
----------
You're definitely not alone. The new interface is uncharacteristically klunky for an Apple UI. Very disappointed.
Honestly, I couldn't agree with you more. This is a terrible step backwards! Imagine designing a UI on this device that hides some icons/content "below the fold" (in other words, makes me need to scroll).
The old interface was concise, easy to use, fast & complete. It lacked features (like being able to customize or remove unused items).
The new UI appears to be targeted at always displaying content that can be purchased from iTunes. Yet another marketing ploy for the most expensive content provider on the planet.
<Aside>
I thought I'd give it a try -- but at $3.49 for a single half-hour episode of a sitcom? Is this really a price-point that iTunes consumers are willing to pay? Certainly not me.
</Aside>
----------
You're definitely not alone. The new interface is uncharacteristically klunky for an Apple UI. Very disappointed.
XBMC - the major reason I got an ATV2 when I already have a PS3. I also like how little electricity the ATV uses compared to the PS3 which gets really hot.
Alas, it streams them like everything else. In a perfect world, I'd be able to hook a Pedabyte of storage and have the Apple TV serve as the front end for a massive blu-ray rip library like you would find in a high-end home entertainment system. But Apple thinks streaming is good enough. I think streaming is one of those things that will never work right because you are in a constant battle with your bandwidth, the sender's bandwidth, and the constant march of data size. There will never be enough bandwidth just like there is never a fast enough chip or enough hard disk space.
Yeah right....
The old one was too. What else is new? Have you even used ATV before? Since 2.x, it's always been targeted to showing new iTunes crap. Even with the one update moving "My crap" to the top, it still defaults to the iTunes selection on screen and over half your "icons" at the top of the screen are for showing iTunes rentals and/or sales, not your stuff. In other words, this is nothing new.
A pedabyte? Just a bit unrealistic, aren't you?
I have zero trouble streaming to my Gen1 AppleTV from a central server in my house. You shouldn't have any trouble either for local stuff, particularly if the new AppleTV is hardware decoding with total aplomb (only time I get into trouble is when the movie is approaching the limits of the hardware as overhead gets in the way). As for streaming across the Net, it's all about bandwidth. I've had zero trouble buffering HD movies since my connection went to 10Mbit. It's usually done downloading the entire movie in less than 20 minutes and starts showing the movie in less than 1 minute.
Yeah right....
[...] The old one was too. What else is new? Have you even used ATV before? [...]
MagnusVonMagnum, no need to be rude to me. My observation, perhaps incorrect, is that the new interface showed larger icons of TV/Movie shows at the top and that they did not appear to be context sensitive. The previous interface [that I maintain was easy to navigate as it was all on one page and I could quickly read the menu items vs. the icons that I now need to first scroll through and then interpret], seemed to put items at the top that related to the highlighted menu option (e.g. if I highlighted Netflix, it showed Netflix movies at the top).
I don't mind being corrected if I misspoke, but please be respectful.
P.
You'll also see that .AVI is also only for motion-JPEG files, not the "DivX" variety. I'm guessing they support motion-JPEG avi files because that's the format used by some older cameras when recording videos.