apple tv2 - jailbreak what is it good for? absolutely nothing?

http://support.firecore.com/entries/387605

Apple TV2

recommendation: Buy if you are an Apple freak and also an Apple User, buy if you have movie rentals in your country and really want to use this feature
+

• price
• size
• speed
• temperature
• noise
• apple integration
• apple remote via iphone/ipad
• airplay from iphone/ipad
• stream all video formats without jailbreak with the help of airvideo server/mac airvideo client/airflick.
• stream screen of mac to apple tv, even if usage is in question
• stream pdf, ppt and other content from mac to apple tv, (airflick 0.30)
• easy renting of movies
• remote (really use all that many buttons on the others? the aluminum version is just gorgeous)
• streaming is the only real solution, I hate copying from disk to disk or whatever.

-

• no simple way to stream Video_TS - need to use some manual process
• remote signal received only from a limited angle. I used to play games with the remote and the iMac or Mac book. I pointed the remote to the ceiling etc and I still was able to navigate, but with the apple tv2 the receiving angle is narrow to say the least.
• Volume control!!! It sucks to have to turn to another remote to control volume, but I think this is not achievable if the audio is going out optical or is it the other way around. I have not been able to enable it and successfully up or down it.

Bugs

• Can be crashed with airplay from iphone

• Caches metadata from itunes library and only updates when restarted. If you feel like you need to add some covers to your movies and then want to see it on apple tv. Nothing helped except power off/on of the appletv2.

• Takes too long to start showing photos when connecting to our 30'000 plus library. It should give something back sooner and continue loading in the background.

Missing features

• itunes based streaming very limited in how to select movies, i.e. genre, by movie, unseen, playlist but not by selecting year, actors etc.

• Photo browsing is a pain. We have over 30'000 pictures and if we want to go by events, we have to scroll down for more than 20 seconds to reach the latest pictures. It should offer a lot more ways to explore the photos, I still hope for an Ipad app that lets me view my pictures from our big iphoto library and present this also on the apple tv (kind of like tv-out with a photo app that is connected to iphoto on the mac).

Missing

• iOS Apps? 
• iphone/ipad gameplay over airplay?
• more dynamic content, it gets really boring after seeing the static animal selection over and over again, apple should make it easy to allow for dynamic additions of the pictures. People would just sit in front of the apple tv and wait for the origami screen saver with beautiful pictures updated dynamically. It is somehwat possible but if you do a flicker search it is limited to 100 pictures and they stay the same for too long. Maybe one should add the possibility to playlists for screen savers, i.e. best selection for yosemite done by users and some nice background music.
• dynamic content, see news and pictures of the album/singer of the currently playing peace, maybe even let one explore some content seen
• genius for apple tv?

Never to have features

• 1080p from Apple
• a sigma design chip that eats all

What were my previous boxes?

windows pc
mac with plex/xbmc/boxee
netgear
popcorn
apple tv
wd tv
wd tv live

Apple TV2 Rocks!!! AirVideo Server->Mac AirVideoClient -> AirFlicks

Apple TV2 streams any video format no jailbreak necessary.

Here is how:

1) Get AirVideo Server 2.4.3

Configure folder to share and start server.

2) Get Mac AirVideo Client  3.0(374)

Edit Servers -> name whatever, location IP Address of where AirVideo server is running. Then click save
Select server from main window and click connect.

3) Get AirFlick 0.30

With 0.30 you don't need to do anything as it connects to apple tv 2 automatically


4) With AirVideo Client select folder->file and then with edit servers panel-> Video press AirFlick Live Conver.

5) Usually you will get an Error. Press menu on the apple tv2 remote and press in Air Video Client the AirFlick Live Conver. Button again.

All done.

I just tried 30 files with different formats etc. and the streaming is just perfect!

Did I mention that when you say apple and perfect there's always a catch: The video controls are not really supported, no fast forward etc.

And I would also like to see a program that integrates as if it would be an itunes server and do live conversion in the process. Air Video to the rescue?

Also many people still have some Video_TS Folders that would be nice to play ;).

apple tv2 - looks like it was worth the wait

I received an apple tv2 as a christmas present and I have not been convinced that it is really a great product. It still is not great but has more appeal than most of the current boxes around. At least if you have some mac gear lying around. I just decided to sell my iPad for lack of usage. Besides consumation I cannot do much and without pdf annotations I really should look at KNO.

I had an apple tv 1 and it was an ok product with the help of xbmc or plex it was even greater, but xbmc and plex fail me regularily and apple tv2 passed the test with my family members. They can use it and it works albeit I was able to crash it with airPlay from an iPhone.

Screen saver, origami is great but it should do random pictures which it is not good at. And with home share to go into the picture section it takes now up to 2 minutes (we have 32000 photos in iphoto) before I can start browsing and did I already mention that I have to manually scroll down in events until the newest photos appear and that takes at least 20 seconds.

And we have more and more movies in iPhoto but they won't show.

What I love is ease of use, homeshare, apple remote on ipad and the limited but functional ui. renting movies is easy and fun and very fast (at least for me) to start streaming. Over christmas I learned of AirFlick and other tools from erica sadun and the future looks very bright and promising. With the help of AirVideo and AirFlick it will be possible to stream any content over to the apple tv2. Just what you could do with a ps3 or almost. But maybe even more.

I still cannot listen to my wifes favorite radio station but maybe I can get it to stream from vlc over to apple tv2 with airflick. But at the moment even I am not able to do so, since I failed to stream from airvideo even with the correct id. The error on apple tv2 came for more than 10 times and then I just stopped trying.

But hey, apple always sells hope as in next time they get it right, they were so close. After almost half of a year with the iPad and going through iterations with fastpdf, goodreader, cloudreader and ibooks I should know better, but I am sucked in and just added another level of addiction. Hey I really think about converting all my DVDs with handbrake (using nightly builds apple tv2 preset) over into iTunes again. (Almost there, maybe AirFlick and AirVideo come to the rescue).

Oh my, I even tested elgato Eyetv again, repluging my hybrid and trying to find ways to bring content into the itunes library. Did I mention that I couldnt stop me from buying an elgato 264.hd turbo stick at 80$ even though I read a lot about the crappyness that it brings, but hey I have had a new thrust of hope and that's all it needs. At least I can escape the WD TV nightmare, not that the box is not ok but it is much more limited in giving hope (did you ever try to really do some cifs or nfs link, I even don't remember if only one of those were supported or not with ccrad, well I failed miserably. The apple tv 1 was customer friendly. I have not bought a popcorn and will not. Streaming is and has been the solution to most of my problems except that I really badly need cloud storage and sync to all to become one.