Hands-On With the New tvOS 13 Update for Fourth and Fifth-Generation Apple TV

[Rique]

Same here

Have you tried un-checking "get beta updates" (can't recall the exact wording, but the option is in software updates) and then re-starting the ATV? After the re-start, try again checking "get betas" and restart again - did that help?

I had the same issue and I'm not sure what I did, but I was able to get it to show up (could be just some random factor).

 

[gk4]

I sympathise.

In the old days of ATV1 with a large internal disk you could simply sync a huge bunch of personal movies, photos, CD-rips. A hobby product that simply worked for family use.

The internal HDD went to favour "modern" cool streaming supported by a poor AppleTV remote app, followed by a crap ATV4 physical remote with a user-UNfriendly ATV Computer app that crashes when you launch a basic photo slideshow.

Playing personal/family media has become a nightmare. Today everything is centered on AppleIDs, DRMs, cloud and subscription services. There's no iTunes home media centre that can plug into the ATV & homepod environment. A basic shared "family" iTunes media centre is a real pain to set up in Apple's world ... there's not even support for a basic 2TB SSD plugged into the back of the ATV.

The only real option pushed by Apple is forcing me (and the rest of the family) to sign up for a monthly fee to stream my personal content from a cloud service ... and then hope to tie me in to purchases.

I have my content and don't need to send data around the world to get access to it. Pay to waste more energy in storage systems and data transmission between server rooms ? No thank you!

Patience running out and will be spending time re-assessing plex and getting rid of the Apple environment.

I have the opposite point of view. Earlier devices needed stuff like plex and transcoding servers (or having you specifically re-encode movies into the needed codecs and profiles). ATV 4k is strong enough that it can natively run a VLC type app that can handle all media on the device.

i have my videos sitting on a PC, and have that folder shared to the network (SMB). I then use the inFuse app (which can connect to network shares) to play those videos. The inFuse app does all the stuff you'd expect from a plex type app (scanning library, finding metadata and artwork, etc.). It does all this without needing any app running on the actual computer that's sharing the files.

 

[SteveW928]

I've come to really appreciate Plex. What brain-dead simple features do you think are missing?

Sorry for the late reply, missed your comment.

Well, the big one for me (and many others it seems based on the forums) is the ability to just download (not sync) a piece of media to a local device from the plex server. Sometimes, yes, it is nice to sync/transcode, but say if you're heading out with the kids on a road-trip, you don't want to load the queue up and wait 10 hours for it to transcode all the videos for their iPad.

That you can't just hit a 'download' button, and have the video copy over locally at network speed, IMO, is kinda braindead.

Also, started putting some photos on there, and noticed there is no 'rotate' command to put the photos into the correct orientation. I'm like.... huh?