Apple TV’s “Take Two” upgrade rocks; Causing problems with Leopard for anyone else?
- February 14th, 2008
- 10 Comments
So I had to wait an extra day for some reason, but last night I got my Take Two upgrade for my Apple TV up and running. I rented an HD movie (The Simpsons, for those who’re curious) and it looked and sounded great. The 5.1 Dolby Surround was flawless and the video looked just amazing, far better than what I get with Comcast HD.
The update itself took just 7 minutes from start to finish. My Apple TV itself now works great. But then I ran into a problem that took me hours to fix.
See, after the upgrade, the Apple TV wouldn’t show up on my MacBook Pro’s iTunes. So I tried re-pairing the two, but no luck. It did recognize the Airtunes built-in to the Take Two upgrade, but couldn’t connect.
I quit and restarted iTunes to no avail. I threw away libraries and preference files, and nothing. A reboot didn’t work either.
Then I rebooted my router and lo! The Apple TV showed up in iTunes. I paired them and was good to go. But hark! What is this treachery? My MacBook lost its Internet connection. It was on the network, but for some reason it couldn’t connect to the Internet itself.
Firefox wouldn’t even try, and iTunes was trying to access the iTunes store, but couldn’t. I couldn’t ping anything. Jabber worked, but iChat wouldn’t connect to the AIM network. Odd indeed.
I tried new DNS settings, but that didn’t help. So I killed iTunes and restarted it, the Apple TV was gone, but my Internet connection was fine.
Dubbya-tea-eff.
I know many MBP users have had many Wi-Fi problems after upgrading to Leopard, but this is just weird. Apple TV and iTunes 7.6 aren’t playing nice, and I can’t seem to figure it out. Round two is this weekend, I’ll let you all know what I come up with. And I’m open to suggestions from the geek crowd here.
And now, images of the Take Two install.
Dave (Who am I?)
7 months ago
What is the resolution of the HD moveis, 768 or 1080?
Matt Hickey (Who am I?)
7 months ago
As near as I could tell, it was 720p, but the movie was very widescreen, so even on my 16:9 HDTV there was letterboxing.
Max cascone (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Do you really have 2G1C on your itunes, always at the ready?
Matt Hickey (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Well, it’s in my iTunes, cuz I keep a copy on my iPod Touch, cuz there are some people who’ve somehow yet to see it.
dwalk51 (Who am I?)
7 months ago
Sure, thats what its for…
Matt Hickey watches 2G1C for entertainment! Should be declared most disgusting human alive for owning a copy of the video at all!
BAGAGT1 (Who am I?)
7 months ago
I would not use an animated movie to judge the quality of any HD source. Try finding a filmed movie with lots of action then make a call. I sincerely doubt the iTunes HD will look better than Comcast HD, but if you are going to make a statement like that at least pick a proper movie to make a comparison.
Matt Hickey (Who am I?)
7 months ago
I guess you’re right, I’ve got Wrath of Khan ready for tonight, but it’s a transfer from old film. I’m planning on doing a side by side with Superbad this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes.
That being said, even when watching animated films on HBO in HD I can see artifacts. With the Apple TV, I really saw none. That’s partly because Comcast is tied to industry standards of the MPEG format, whereas Apple is free to play with H.264, which I’m fairly certain this film was compressed with.
annonymous (Who am I?)
7 months ago
I would send an email to Apple’s Mac OS X team and/or the iTunes application team informing them of the problem your experiencing. They are probably already aware of these problems but maybe not this specific issue.
Just go to http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback for OS X feedback
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html
http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html
Mike (Who am I?)
7 months ago
iTunes and Apple TV not playing nice? If you are running OS 10.5.2 go to System Preferences, Security/Firewall and change it to Allow all incoming connections. Not safe but it gets things working. When Firewall was set to Set access for specific services and applications every time iTunes syncs to Apple TV the setting for iTunes would change from Allow incoming connections to Block incoming connections. I might have to use a third party firewall like Watershed to get around this one.
David Dugan (Who am I?)
7 months ago
@BAGAGT1… actually, the consensus seems to be that the AppleTV at 720p is indeed visibly superior to cable HD (which is, as suggested, not H.264 and heavily compressed to boot). Check out this link:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/apple-tv-20-vs-blu-ray-dvd-hd-cable-the-comparison/