It’s here! Hot damn, it’s here! I don’t own an Apple TV but I saw one in an Apple store once. It looked so awesome. Anyway, the new update is here. Check for the Software Update option under the Settings menu. Once everything churns and wiggles, you’ll be able to rent iTunes movies and access Flickr and .Mac photostreams. Enjoy!
Apple TV ‘Take Two’ update now available [Macworld]
Absolutely loving it!!!
Just installed the update and tried it all out….started to download a rental of Live Free or Die Hard in HD, and within 1.5 minutes, ATV2 says it’s ready to play! (Of course I won’t because I wouldn’t be able to finish it in these 24 hours - curse the 24-hour limit!)
File size of that movie is just over 4GB — I know b/c I had 17.97GB free, and now my ATV2 says there’s only 13.92GB free….
New menu system is awesome. It’s all there on the home screen, and it remembers your last choice to save you from scrolling/hitting a direction repeatedly.
Now onto the tests……how can I encode my own stuff to playback true 5.1 DD?! And, is there a way to put DVD cover art on my own movies and TV shows?
OMG! This UI sucks, sucks, sucks! If you use AppleTV primarily to stream off your computer’s iTunes (vs. buying content on iTunes), you will HATE this update. Why? Well, to switch between content categories (i.e., to go from “TV” to “Film”), it takes three times as many clicks, and you have to reconnect to your iTunes library EACH time. In addition, TV shows are no longer categorized by show — all TV show videos are lumped together in a SINGLE SCREEN. So I now have to scroll through EVERY EPISODE of EVERY TV SHOW I have to find a single one, and the videos aren’t listed by the name of the episode (as they were before), but rather by the name of the TV show. So, the words “South Park” appears 150+ times. I had to do a factory restore, which means I lost the YouTube update and I will now no longer we able to update my AppleTV ever again. This is terrible! It’s a totally different product. The focus is now completely on buying iTunes content. They have completely abandoned people who want to stream content to AppleTV from their computer. For the first time in my life, I am furious at Apple!
I stream all my recorded and encoded TV shows off a big drive connected to my MacBook, and switching between streamed TV shows to streamed movies is really fast.
To get to your TV shows fast, here’s what you do: In iTunes, you have to go to “Get Info”, then make sure the “info” and “video” information is appropriate for each episode (e.g., sequentially numbering episodes). You might also have to check the box that says, “part of a compliation” when it’s in a group.
When your iTunes info is set up nicely, all shows are collected under one title on aTV. But, if you have different seasons of the same show, I’m sure that you can make different compilations to accommodate those seasons for easier access (i.e., less clicks) on aTV.