Now only if VLC was available in the App Store...
This actually sounds like a recipe to get zero work done.
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Apple Now Approving iOS 4.3-Compatible AirPlay Apps
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Now only if VLC was available in the App Store...
This actually sounds like a recipe to get zero work done.
Your point is valid to an extent but I still believe the AppleTV will have apps and not just AirPlay. There are too many possibilities for Apps built directly for your TV. There's also too much of an opportunity to use the TV as a hub for gaming with iDevices as controls. AirPlay may be a short term solution for the lack of an AppleTV App Store, but it certainly is not the destination of the AppleTV iOS platform.
Here's to Airplaying Hulu Plus to Apple TV. If that happens, I might be able to ditch cable TV. That's a savings of at least $50 a month for me!
They would first have to get permission to use it from Apple and then likely license it. Probably won't happen. Interestingly, most TVs made today already have an AirPlay-like technology already built-in to it. Yes, too bad, Apple did not innovate the idea of AirPlay. What Apple actually did was not play nice with the DLNA collaborative and made their own DLNA-like service so they could make more money for themselves and have 100% control over the way we use our iDevices. If they went along with the DLNA technology, we would already be leaps and bounds ahead.
http://www.dlna.org/home
Well, if Apple is planning an App store for AppleTV, they sure aren't demonstrating it in the hardware they're releasing. The new AppleTV doesn't have an input device that can handle apps efficiently. If you need to rely on your iPhone/iPod/iPad then there's no advantage of running the app on the AppleTV versus on the mobile device and streaming its content to the tv. If Apple is planning on releasing a touch screen dedicated remote, it's going to cost at least half the price of the AppleTV so that's not an option.
The mobile devices that are already in hundreds of millions of people's hands can handle apps a lot better than an AppleTV. They have much more storage (only 8GB on AppleTV, dedicated to buffering), people handle them directly and nobody wants to have to buy and deal with a third version of the same app.
There may be room for passive apps that require little direct manipulation but I think Apple is going for iPhone/iPad apps beamed to your tv via AirPlay versus an App store for AppleTv.
Well, StreamToMe was one of the original apps in this category (streaming transcoded video to iOS devices) and from my experience it usually gets new features before AirVideo. In my hands (under Mac OS X), it was also a lot more stable than AirVideo when these two apps first appeared in the App Store (i.e. StreamToMe worked, while AirVideo often didn't). For these reasons, I generally prefer StreamToMe although in the past year these two apps have become quite similar in features and both are fairly reliable (although neither is perfect).
Really? Because people are already running apps on the AppleTV and the hardware is working just fine.
You only need an Apple Remote, that's efficient enough. the advatntage of running the App on the AppleTV is it frees up your iDevice to, well, be your iDevice.
The next iteration could be easily bumped to 16GB. Even now, 8GB is plenty for what's out there. And you're unfamiliar with Universal Apps??? Even now, there's a possibility some apps are iPhone/iPad only. A third's not going to cause chaos. Heck, I think the point of an AppleTV App Store would be dedicated Apps so who'd complain anyway?
On some games you can already do something similar to this by using one iOS device as the video source to the TV and another iOS device as the controller. For example, with Chopper 2 running on my iPad I can connect the iPad to the TV and use an iPhone as the wireless game controller. Thus, if games/apps come to the Apple TV 2 then there is no reason why this couldn't work with the Apple TV as the video source.
However, don't expect AirPlay to work with games since the only thing that can be streamed is H.264 video and games don't output or draw in compressed/streaming video.
u might be right about cpu, idk. it might be due to gpu acceleration, it might be due to wired network, fact is, atv2 can decode 1080p mkvs flawless now, iphone cannot (atleast not from lan).
8 gigs on the atv2 is a mute point, while jailbroken, streaming still works with apps installed. plex and xbmc allready availiable, and add tons of value to an atv2.
even though u havent needed more than wireless n doesnt mean others dont. streaming 1080p over wifi will in many cases not work reliably.
Hopefully this will allow the likes of:
BBC iPlayer
4oD
ITV Player
For the UK users to make AppleTV slightly more useful. I enjoy being able to watch and listen to my media; opening up access to catch up on prime TV would be the icing on the cake for myself.
BBC iPlayer
4oD
ITV Player
For the UK users to make AppleTV slightly more useful. I enjoy being able to watch and listen to my media; opening up access to catch up on prime TV would be the icing on the cake for myself.
Except that DLNA was specifically designed as a non-Apple response to AirTunes.
Why should Apple play nice with a poorer[1] system that was designed to compete with them? If DLNA was ubiquitous and widely used by the mass market, they'd have to work with it, but it isn't, and I suspect they figure they can at the least carve room in the market for both platforms.
[1]For sheer user simplicity Airtunes/play is a superior system.
It has a remote control, that's all it needs unless you're looking for a gaming device.
Surely the obvious thing would be to spend less time wondering how iPhone apps would work on a TV, and more time looking at the apps that *already* work on a TV as inspiration for what could come next.
If the AppleTV gets app support, it's not going to be so that you can play swipe based games.
Is that true? Buffering only needs a few hundred MB or so of that 8GB. Typically a complete movie weighs in at less than 2GB, so is there some reason that the remaining 6+GB is being locked away?
Depends on the movie, and future requirements. An 8GB SSD is extremely cheap, so I'm betting they used it to give it a little future proofing. In the future, some movies may take up the entire 8GB if they turn more interactive. DVD-like in other words.
That's an interesting observation (is it really true?) since you can find a good number of posts from Apple TV users who claim that the Apple TV can't even display 720p reliably (that is, without the TV experiencing random stutters). No doubt, the Apple TV 2 will accept 1080p sources right now (just as on my iPad) but I've read a number of reports from users who say that while 1080p will decode it won't play flawlessly.
Frankly, I don't expect support for 1080p playback on the Apple TV until next year, and that will require upgraded hardware (i.e. Apple TV 3, using a dual-core ARM9 CPU/GPU). That is probably when Apple will finally get serious about apps on the Apple TV -- right now I think they are too busy with the iPad and iPhone to be worried about the Apple TV. However, with just about every other TV platform supporting apps I think Apple will eventually be forced to do the same. Although AirPlay will become a great feature as soon as the content providers begin to support it (or more correctly, if they decide to support it -- not all will enable AirPlay because of licensing restrictions), I really believe that apps will need to come directly to the Apple TV. If apps don't come within the next year then I'd say that the Apple TV is going to fall prey to the smart TVs.
A standard-length HD movie with Dolby 5.1 from the iTunes Store will run just over 4GB and Apple uses a progressive download technique for the iTunes Store content, thus one HD movie requires at least 4GB of flash storage which means that even today it's somewhat difficult to download/rent more than one HD movie at a time (since the Apple TV's 8GB of storage wouldn't allow it to hold the entire contents of both movies in storage at the same time -- that means that parts of the movie might need to be streamed in realtime which could result in performance issues if your internet connection is relatively slow).
As far as an "8GB SSD" being extremely cheap, that's a bit of a misnomer. The Apple TV doesn't use an SSD, it uses embedded flash storage that isn't nearly as fast or performance tuned as a true SSD. But that's a good thing since the Apple TV doesn't need the kind of performance that is offered by SSDs and besides simple flash storage will be cheaper than any equivalent SSD. So, your point is still somewhat valid, I just don't take to your use of the term "SSD."
I think you're right.
I'd like Apple to put out an ATV app store, but it makes sense to leverage the phones and ipads people already have. And since they apparently want to maintain a tight level control on the ATV user experience (seems like the Apple TV Netflix app was made by apple, not netflix), it seems only a few additional new "apps" will be added to the ATV, and those will be made by apple.
Really, they should do both (ATV app store plus broad airplay support), but hey, this is still a hobby so I wouldn't hold my breath.
But when using AirPlay you can only "beam" video and audio and relatively static images and some apps require a lot more than that. The problem for Apple is that the TV competition is going "whole hog" for apps and those products will be able to offer features that can't be supported with just the Apple TV (in its current form). I think the AirPlay/iPad/iPhone/Apple TV combination is really great and the ultimate couch potato setup is the iPad combined with the Apple TV and fully enabled AirPlay. But, a limited number of apps will eventually have to come to the Apple TV if Apple wants that product to go mainstream.
Nevertheless, there is a strong rational behind having a single device (i.e. preferably the iPad, but also the iPhone or iPod touch) that can interface anywhere and to anything that can be connected to an Apple TV. In that model, the Apple TV is pretty much a cheap display adapter for the iOS device that you keep on or with your person. This highlights one problem with the straight Google TV or smart TV type devices in that you need to duplicate the entire functionality of those devices for each display that you wish to own or use and that can be rather inefficient and expensive. I also agree that for the most part you want to read on a device that you hold relatively close, so that will always make the iPad a better choice for reading over a TV-type device.
DLNA was a response to AirTunes? How can this be, DLNA products have been on the market since 2004. As for being ubiquitous, 245 companies make DLNA devices with 7,000 different products certified since it's inception. It may not be marketed well (doesnt have Steve Jobs on stage acting like Apple just invented this capability), but it's around.
As for actual performance, I would hope having 3 different devices running the same OS sending 3-4 different types of media files to only one device is going to run better than 7,000 devices communicating a very large amount of different media files to one another.
Sorry but you are wrong. Apple introduced the Airport Express with Airtunes in 2004. There were no DLNA products until after Apple introduced Airtunes. DLNA certainly was a response to Airtunes. Also, one of the worst things about the DLNA "spec" is that it really isn't a spec because with so many manufacturers involved they couldn't agree on many things and so left the spec rather open. The result is that there are many different implementations of DLNA and they are fully not compatible with each other which defeats the whole purpose. That's why a device that is supposed to "support" DLNA from one company often doesn't work well with a device that "supports" DLNA from another company. And often they won't even work at all.
There are far more issues with using DLNA compared to Airplay for this very reason. Common sense will tell you that one manufacturer controlling the spec, the software, and the hardware can easily produce an implementation that works better and more reliably. And streaming is one of those instances where Apple's model really works out far better.
Have you even tried out Airplay and compared it to DLNA? Have you compared the playback controls? Have tested to see how fast the videos start up? How well the fast forwarding and rewinding work? How well slow motion works or skipping forward and backward deep into the stream?
I am almost certain you haven't because these are all things that make it very clear to see that Airplay is superior to DLNA.
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IOS 4.3 allows air playing video taken from your iPhone to your atv from your iPhone. Works great.
well i dont know what bitrates those guys used or what filetypes theyve tested, and i dont know how scott davilla and the xbmc crew did it, but 1080p mkvs downloaded from far and near friends on the internet works perfectly now. dont take my word for it. head over to the xbmc forums and see what others are saying. or better yet, try for yourself.
that saved me a lot of typing
I would add that a key difference, and kas23, this is why I stated that AirTunes is 'superior', is that AirTunes/Play is push, where DLNA is pull. This simply makes for a more user friendly system.
There have been complaints even about Apple's own iTunes Store content at 720p so if that doesn't work smoothly for some on the Apple TV 2 then I can't see how anyone else could get 1080p working in a completely flawless manner. Problem is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you can never be sure if user A will see something that user B does not.
Frankly, I've not had any problems with 720p on either the Apple TV 2 or my iPad, but I've had limited experience with the new Apple TV (I've watched only two or three HD programs on the Apple TV 2). As for the other reports, I'd be willing to "blame" network issues or encoding problems but I've read enough posts from others to believe that there may be something else going on with HD playback on the Apple TV (since some users have gone the extra mile to eliminate the obvious problems).
I'd like to try XBMC myself except for the fact that I don't want to hack my Apple TV. I did, however, just visit the XBMC forum and I note that the first release of XBMC for iOS just happened five days ago -- is that really long enough to know that it is playing everything perfectly (particularly since the first day seemed to be dominated by reports that it either crashed or didn't work at all -- apparently the result of a bad build for the initial release)? The current release is also limited to 720p output, so even though it is decoding 1080p it is only displaying 720p.
In any case, if people are satisfied with the results they are getting then that's all well and fine and I'm not going to throw water on their happiness.