Apple TV on my TV
I picked up my Apple TV today from Fedex since I wasn’t expecting the delivery a day early. It is quite a good looking device, both physically and what it puts on the screen. The little remote might bother me a little as I’ve come to expect more from remotes since I got my Logitech Harmony remote. I wonder if Apple has included discrete codes in the device, so I can setup a macro on my remote that will turn on my receiver and start shuffling through my music. I don’t want to have to turn on my TV every time I want to listen to music.
Anyway, time to play with it will have to wait since the Sweet 16 is on.
Update: Well, 2 things I was hoping to do with the Apple TV don’t seem possible. I wanted to be able to control my music playing on the Apple TV from my laptop from anywhere in the house. The 2 ways I was thinking that would work would be by having it show up as remote speakers in iTunes for playing my local iTunes stuff, a la AirTunes, or by actually selecting the media that are on the Apple TV from the iTunes devices interface. Neither of these work. Is this a deal-breaker for me? I’m not sure yet, but playing music through my stereo without the TV on was one of the things I was expecting from the Apple TV.
Update 2: So far I’ve mainly been using it for listening to music and it sounds fine, I just shut the TV off once the music starts. I don’t think it sounds better than my Archos Recorder v1 from 2002 running Rockbox through S/PDIF, but the UI is nicer looking. The only video I’ve watched so far was from The Merlin Show in hi-res, and it looked ok, better than SD but not as good as HD. I was able to hook up my Harmony remote to work reasonably well, but still discrete codes for playlists or something would make things better. These instructions helped get things setup with the remote. The slide shows are nice and look great, I think they are my wife’s favorite feature so far.
Daniel Wanja
HTML5, iOS and Ruby On Rails Nouvelles Solutions, Inc.
d@n-so.com
