I don't care about features. I just want to play my music. But I DO like the album view right now.
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.
iTunes 11.3 Expands iTunes Extras as Apple TV Finally Adds Support and Apple Plans for iOS 8
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I don't care about features. I just want to play my music. But I DO like the album view right now.
Yes I'm streaming them directly from the cloud to Apple TV.
Agreed that this is half baked. I've observed that none of the Extras that had animated backgrounds (like the Hobbit Extended Edition) are automatically not included. All the Extras I've been viewing on Apple TV are ones with static backgrounds.
There are apps outside the US. Quite a few in the UK and even Sweden have one. So it's doable, just not as transparent on how to do it as you'd wish it would be.
Please!
I've had to turn this off on my iphone because I don't want it to manage my music. I want it to make my music available, what it did instead was delete music I wanted local on my device because I didn't want to have to waste cellular data or even reliant on its availability.
Just because I want access to all my music over the cloud shouldn't mean I MUST access it all through the cloud all of the time.
Unrelated and off-topic.
You don't have to access it through the cloud all the time. Download it from the cloud to your phone and it is now local until you delete it.
It DID get an overhaul and it SUCKED (i.e. they removed Cover Flow, which was great for movies since you got an alphabetical list with covers that weren't so darn tiny as artwork) and for awhile the album art in list mode as well. They also moved speaker selection from the bottom right corner in the "extra pane" where it had a nice display of what speakers were selected and was always available to the right of the volume slider where the speaker selected is always hidden making it hard to see where your output is going (on systems like mine where I have 6 rooms of audio and 4 video.
Personally, I'm all for improvements that speed things up and make life better, but 100% against screwing with a user interface that I'm used to and takes seconds to do things (somehow like above, Apple often seems to make things WORSE not better when they change GUIs). Frankly, I find nothing "slow" about iTunes on my Quad i7. I can only guess that people who find it slow are using very old machines, but given it worked just fine on my somewhat upgraded PPC server I used until late 2012, I find this highly unlikely as well.
I wonder if AppleTV will finally have access to the Album Plus feature that attempted to bring back lots of artwork (like LPs typically have) and other extras for full album sales. I think that worked on AppleTV Gen1 as well. I'm not even sure if they even sell albums with it anymore.
What I really would like to see is an App Store for AppleTV so I can add XBMC to newer generation AppleTVs (ATV Gen2 can add it with some jailbreaking effort, but Gen3 can't use any other players at all unless you use something like Plex Server + Airplay or Airplay from a Mac or iPad to access things it can't normally access like Amazon Prime or even AVI files). It would be nice if Apple would finally acknowledge there are other formats out there other than theirs plus MP3s like say FLAC, AVI and MKV. If iTunes supported those, I really wouldn't even need/want XBMC.
I also really wish Apple would fix the iOS/ATV support for 44.1k music so it outputs digitally natively. In other words, I can play DTS Music CDs through my 1st Gen ATV perfectly fine. My receiver sees the DTS signal and decodes to 5.1 or 6.1 audio accordingly. With ATV2/3 it upconverts to 48kHz, which destroys the encoded signal and you only get static since the receiver doesn't get the proper signal. There is no reason for this other than the fact they never made a proper driver for iOS hardware to handle anything other than 48kHz (the Gen1 boxes were running OS X Tiger essentially, not iOS and had regular audio drivers that can handle multiple output formats). I know of no actual hardware limitation (i.e. pretty much every DAC on Earth can do 44.1kHz since it's a CD standard). I've found that ATV2/3 can handle 44.1Khz internally (i.e. if I send the signal from my ATV2 to my ATV1 using Airplay Speakers, the DTS signal is intact) so clearly it's ONLY a problem in the actual output driver to to its own DAC. I've sent Apple feedback on this asking for a better driver, but unless large numbers of people request it, they'll likely just ignore it like they do MOST FEEDBACK (e.g. still trying to get them to add NFS networking assertions so the computer can sleep/wake when accessed with NFS instead of SMB or AFP protocols. Two OS X updates later and they still haven't addressed it and probably never will unless a lot of people demand it).
Last edited:
You do know it's up to the studios whether they let your digital copy be HD or SD? It is not up to Apple.
Finally here -Thank you Apple
Happy Apple finally got around to doing this....been sticking with a Generation 1 because it still plays the Extra content - but also because of the local storage. But this could get me to jump (after waiting through the holidays to see if a new hardware version comes out).
I'm guessing that'll be the end of old style download Extra's and the end of Extra's for the Generation 1 for future released movies (be interesting to see).
I'd definitely want to be able to download the extras to my Mac and stage it from there to the AppleTV...hopefully there's a way to do this...my father in law doesn't have a good enough internet connection for streaming, but downloading over a long period of time and watching on his AppleTV (Gen 3) from his Mac later is no problem.
Happy Apple finally got around to doing this....been sticking with a Generation 1 because it still plays the Extra content - but also because of the local storage. But this could get me to jump (after waiting through the holidays to see if a new hardware version comes out).
I'm guessing that'll be the end of old style download Extra's and the end of Extra's for the Generation 1 for future released movies (be interesting to see).
I'd definitely want to be able to download the extras to my Mac and stage it from there to the AppleTV...hopefully there's a way to do this...my father in law doesn't have a good enough internet connection for streaming, but downloading over a long period of time and watching on his AppleTV (Gen 3) from his Mac later is no problem.
Hmmm... Frozen has new extras. The gallery is new, so is the trivia bonus.
The big news here is that you will be able to watch your extras on your Apple TV + iOS.
There is a possibility that we will be getting new extras for some movies.
The downside is that SD movies are out of luck with no extras whatsoever and that the UI is a unified Apple approach not in line with the movie's BD menu.
The big news here is that you will be able to watch your extras on your Apple TV + iOS.
There is a possibility that we will be getting new extras for some movies.
The downside is that SD movies are out of luck with no extras whatsoever and that the UI is a unified Apple approach not in line with the movie's BD menu.
Well...
This is confusing. Not on all movies, only some - and can't get it to show up at all on Apple TV (yes latest update applied recently)
The most perplexing thing is, i cannot get iTunes extras to play ON MY MAC at all anymore.
The message I'm getting on my iMac (all in one machine of course!) is:
'The selected movie won't play on your display
This movie can be played only on displays that support HDCP'
EH?????? im not using an external display!!!! just trying to play them on my iMac from within iTunes.
Anyone else got this error??
This is confusing. Not on all movies, only some - and can't get it to show up at all on Apple TV (yes latest update applied recently)
The most perplexing thing is, i cannot get iTunes extras to play ON MY MAC at all anymore.
The message I'm getting on my iMac (all in one machine of course!) is:
'The selected movie won't play on your display
This movie can be played only on displays that support HDCP'
EH?????? im not using an external display!!!! just trying to play them on my iMac from within iTunes.
Anyone else got this error??
Not installing
On my Mavericks iMac it showed up in Software Update and installed fine, but on my Mountain Lion MacBook it doesn't show up in Software Update. If I start iTunes and have it check for updates it says there is one and takes me to Software Update where it still doesn't show up. Rebooted. Same thing. Any ideas?
On my Mavericks iMac it showed up in Software Update and installed fine, but on my Mountain Lion MacBook it doesn't show up in Software Update. If I start iTunes and have it check for updates it says there is one and takes me to Software Update where it still doesn't show up. Rebooted. Same thing. Any ideas?
Again: look at what happened to iWork. They rewrote those apps and probably took out what you might call "unnecessary bloat" and in the process pretty much destroyed Keynote and Pages. Just because you don't use feature X doesn't mean nobody does.
So what part of it sucks as far as it relates to the iTunes for Mac application?
----------
Thought I might be the only one seeing this. I'm wondering if it's some glitch or of it's somehow really only available for Mavericks and above and this is sort of an indirect way to "nag" people to upgrade.
----------
Isn't that just an option that can by easily enabled (as always)?
Are you asking which of the problems are server side and which in the app? I don't know if anyone here could answer that but an app update would be a good opportunity to roll out some fixes. But for apple, nothing seems to be an opportunity to roll out any fixes.
Same situation here with Mountain Lion.
Looks like we'll have to take matters into our own hands:
https://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
I had something like this happen to me (Mountain Lion) with regards to the latest Safari update....had to download it directly from the web and install it manually, couldn't get it to show up in the App Store (give me the old software update we had in Lion and older any day).
I'm assuming the OP meant something like a Matroska file, which currently requires using a third party video player like VLC, under iOS. In that case, it's highly likely the video codec in use is H.264, especially if it's an HD file, so the issue would be just iOS supporting Matroska containers.
That said, there's always the potential hiccup of the video stream using features of H.264 not supported by the particular iOS device in question, or indeed, audio codecs unsupported by iOS.
All quite surmountable, but, I doubt we'll see iOS support any containers beyond MPEG-4. Apple's never given any indication of being interested in such, even on OS X - we've always had to use MplayerX, VLC, or the fairly wonderful Perian QuickTime plugin.
Very pleased to hear Apple wants more iTunes Extras! I rarely buy feature-only iTunes releases, unless the physical release is also devoid of extras. Whilst I prefer downloading them for local storage, I'd probably be okay with them being streamed.
Now, if only they could persuade anime distributors to provide multiple audio tracks.. some folk prefer English dubs, others the Japanese originals. Whilst MPEG-4 containers can happily accommodate multiple audio tracks, it seems iTunes Extras has never exploited that. Similarly, I'd love to see commentary tracks - if they're available on the physical releases, why not here as well? Many of the Doctor Who commentaries are supposedly great fun, and the commentary tracks on the animated Clerks were outstanding. ^_^
Now, if only they could persuade anime distributors to provide multiple audio tracks.. some folk prefer English dubs, others the Japanese originals. Whilst MPEG-4 containers can happily accommodate multiple audio tracks, it seems iTunes Extras has never exploited that. Similarly, I'd love to see commentary tracks - if they're available on the physical releases, why not here as well? Many of the Doctor Who commentaries are supposedly great fun, and the commentary tracks on the animated Clerks were outstanding. ^_^
I totally agree with you two!!! Granted when the digital movie age started there was no HD, why can't the do something like the iTunes plus upgrade??
But of course! Didn't EVEN think about getting it straight from the horse's mouth.
This seems to be the first time Update has messed up for me. When I downloaded the new iTunes on Mavericks, though, the fine print legal stuff message was talking about how the program is a preview and that it contains proprietary Apple stuff like it says when I download real preview stuff like Yosemite, so I don't know what that was all about. Never noticed it before.
Thanks for jogging my brain!
I really like that iTunes extras have been added to ATV. But I have two problems with the new iTunes extras that have been added. I've only been able to check the new extras on my computer and not the ATV so far.
First, some of the quality menus that used to be in the original versions have been replaced with standard pictures (ex: Harry Potter films, Hunger Games, Zero Dark Thirty). Second, some of the extras have been removed that were previously on the original version (Indiana Jones, Hunger Games).
I appreciate the new extras to movies I already have in my library, I just was hoping for an interesting menu that I was used to (and is on the Blu-Ray version) instead of boring photo.
First, some of the quality menus that used to be in the original versions have been replaced with standard pictures (ex: Harry Potter films, Hunger Games, Zero Dark Thirty). Second, some of the extras have been removed that were previously on the original version (Indiana Jones, Hunger Games).
I appreciate the new extras to movies I already have in my library, I just was hoping for an interesting menu that I was used to (and is on the Blu-Ray version) instead of boring photo.
I still have nightmares that some of that Bling Ping thing would pop-up from somewhere in iTunes somehow....
I've purchased a couple of iTunes Extras items in the last couple of years. Mostly, they seemed to offer features that weren't really that impressive, and they took up enormous amounts of space. And they automatically installed themselves on my iPhones via iBooks, without my choosing to.
I've had to go thru and get them all back off my iPhone to get the space back.
I've had to go thru and get them all back off my iPhone to get the space back.
anyone else having problems accessing iTunes Extras? I cannot seem to get to them for the films i bought (Argo and Dark Knight Rises are two examples). I keep getting prompted for my password which it rejects or when its in the store it shows up that I have not bought it.