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Nov 19, 08 - 10:39 pm Comment from: SteveJobsAllergy

awesome! It keeps getting better

Nov 19, 08 - 11:30 pm Comment from: SteveRey

I love my Apple TV. I use it all the time.

Nov 19, 08 - 11:38 pm Comment from: Sir Real B. Czar

If you have Boxee installed, you might want to hold off.
So far, it can't be re-installed.

Video Playlists!! Finally!

Yes! AirTunes streaming FROM my AppleTV! This has been long awaited from my part.

Can some please explain WHY THE F#$%@ APPLE TV REMOTE CAN'T OFFICIALLY CONTROL MOVIE VOLUME YET ?!!!!

BEEN WAITING FOR THIS SINCE ATV DAY 2 !!!!

OMG I think by next update, if there is no system wide volume control i'm going to FREAKING SMASH this bastard child of Apple product once and for all. I mean it, its such BS that its taken such a long time to give us ONLY MUSIC VOLUME CONTRL?!!... WTF ... how could u design a freaking MOVIE/itunes player device and not able to control MOVIE VOLUME ?!!! why even have the freaking + and - buttons on the ATV remote ? is not logical that should be for Volume + - ?!!! how many freaking Apple engineers does it take to write that into the ATV OS? Doesn't it run the all mighty QuickTimes under the ATV UI anyways, so why no volume? Like many of you, I have been waiting for ATV to freaking graduate out of the hobby stage. COME'ON !!! APPLE WTF... how many updates would it take to give us some real useful ATV software, what about SAFARI while at it? no .. hmm ok AT LEAST GIVE ME FREAKING VOLUME CONTROL FOR MY MOVIES !!!!! are you turning into freaking M$CrapWares now?

- KATO with ANGER !!!!!

Jesus, put the thing on ebay.

Or, get a surround sound system and plug the damn thing into that.

Nov 20, 08 - 12:33 am Comment from: grok

Get some, Kato.

Yeah. Volume.

Yeah.

oops typo there, but can someone < please explain... that is, why ATV still no Movie volume control, seriously.

OK .. hmm.. question smart pants, can you control your SurroundSound system with the ATV remote while watching a movie? hmm guess not, now you have to use a second remote just to control volume on a movie you just bought. Where is the elegance and simplicity of ease of use on that? Yet thats only half the real point here. If you really take a deep look into the ATV design, which is no buttons anywhere, just use the ATV remote for software media playback as final solution.. then it begs the question to what does the + and - on the remote that came with the ATV is supposed to do if not for Volume.
Can someone with real answers from MDN shed some light to this real issue?

I threw that crap apple remote out as soon as my real remote learned its buttons. My remote control handles the apple tv and movie volume, no problem. .

As far as the remote apple has been making the same remote before the AppleTV so the + and - has always been there. they just use one remote for all the products (Front Row)

then, why Volume control for only Music and not for Movies too? is there a technical reason ?

Sorry everyone, I should have clarified: I weigh 500 pounds, and it's really hard for me to press the volume buttons on the TV with my reaching broom.

That wasn't me but it was almost funny. Good try.

@Kato
Your exuberance aside, I think you have raised a legitimate question that begs for an answer from Apple. Having the ability now to pair with other remotes to control the volume as well as other ATV operations, is certainly 'a solution,' but it leaves the problem unaddressed still.

Maybe the Apple is running the show with too few engineers, and the resources are spread thin à la initial phase of the Iraq war strategy. But then again having the plethora of engineering resources (and outsourced too) didn't seem to chalk up a better run for MS. So, who knows. Maybe Jobs, maybe not. Time will tell. I am no Jobs, but I probably would have allowed an outside team to play my hobbies for me while I focus on the primary legs for a bit. I think that may not be such an alien DNA for Apple given that's how the Mac team started.

Anyway, Kato, thank you for sharing your frustration. I have a few of my own, but I like my Apple TV and have learnt to work around that. I am glad that I can now at least control the volume on the music, before I had none. I also have a feeling, Apple TV will get a hardware face lift in January. We are the beta users till then. Thank you for coming. Support the hobbyists. Drive well.

Nov 20, 08 - 02:40 am Comment from: Botvinnik

Why in the heck don't they put that cool Visualizer in iTunes on tv?

@krquet

Thanks, but whatever the excuse or patchwork its really not acceptable at this point (update 2.3), specially for beta testers like us who supported the initial 1.0 device. The fact that they were able to add Vol control for music pretty much suggest Apple intentionally didn't offer Vol control for movies. Unless there is a technical reason which I have not found so far. Even my cheapo DVD player, PS3 and Cable box all have Vol control that works.

Don't get me wrong I like the promise/direction of the ATV, I have given it a fair chance since day one. In fact I bought two ATV, the second one was for a gift to a close friend.

Finally, just imagine your Volume Keys didn't work on ur AppleKeyboard and other users tell u " well just go buy a new keyboard as solution". I strongly believe that attention to this type of details makes a great company regardless of its size. Anyhow, thanks to all MDN responders that still care for the small details that makes great design... well, Great.

Hey Kato ... quit your whining and go get the car! ... Mr X is on the loose.









I agree with all of your posts above!

hmm.. I'm tired of saving your sorry weak ass.
good try, was almost funny.

Volume control must be the feature I'd be least interested in seeing. My dvd player doesn't have it and I've managed well enough with it for the last however many years.

I installed Boxee last week, and it just makes me wish Apple would add codecs and support for third party modules, I really couldn't get on with it and even with the added functionality I got rid of it. I'll stick with converting my dvds.

Nov 20, 08 - 06:18 am Comment from: British Mac Head

@kato

Never really worried about picking up the TV remote to control volume. After all. DVD player remotes don't usually control your TV volume unless they are the same make as the TV.

But having said that, it would be useful. However I have a tv/vcr/dvd slider switch on the side of my Toshiba TV remote. I switched it to DVD and programmed the AppleTV to recognise buttons from that. It's much better than hunting for Apple's tiny remote.

As for the remote having + and - on it. It's the same remote that is used for all MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Minis and the iPod HiFi.

We have five of these remotes in our house as we got one each with our two MacBooks, one with the Mac Mini one with the iPod HiFi one with the AppleTV.

They all end up down the back of the sofa from time to time

My favourite comment is the one from Botvinnik
Dude, you are so right, My wife has been moaning that the iTunes visualisers are not on the AppleTV for months now. In fact. When I told her about the latest update she said. I bet they didn't add the visualisers did they?

Apple, if you read MDN then please stick iTunes visualisers on your wish list. It would be awesome at parties.

Anyone know if there is a way to send suggestions to different divisions at Apple?

Nov 20, 08 - 08:51 am Comment from: ron

Is there no peace and patience any more?

We used to moan a bit about walking behind our wooden plough, (the wife was pulling), but nowadays it's all push-button.

Nov 20, 08 - 08:56 am Comment from: Connor MacBook

I'm just wondering if they'll ever update the hardware. Or is 160GB enough considering it's for caching, not storing?

Why can't I get my apple tv to sync the movies bought on it to my Mac and from my mac to the Apple TV? Seems this should be easy and seemless, yet it doesn't seem to work for me..

Nov 20, 08 - 10:58 am Comment from: Predrag

I can offer my own opinion regarding the reasons for the missing volume control for movies. Music output is provided via stereo analogue output. That means that there is a D/A conversion at one point. The Volume feature adjusts analogue levels in the D/A converter.

HDMI streams digital bits of audio and video without any change to them. In order to implement volume control to the variety of audio options (Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD, DSD, MasterAudio, SACD), and in variety of channel configurations (2 ch stereo, 2+1, 3+1 Pro Logic, 5+1, 7+1, etc), there would have to be a dedicated DSP unit responsible for decoding these audio streams, applying volume change (and how would that volume be changed? Linearly? With some loudness curve applied? To which channels?) and re-encoding them.

I may be wrong, but this seems a rather plausible explanation. This is the main reason why no DVD (or Blu-ray) player has its own volume control. The only devices that DO have volume control are those that output analogue signal in the end (i.e. TVs with speakers or analogue outputs, or amps/preamps/audio receivers ).

Nov 20, 08 - 11:05 am Comment from: Predrag

In other words, if what I was saying above is correct, your request may be too complex and costly to implement, as it would need either additional hardware (DSP), or some really very fancy software code that could use existing processing power to to decoding, processing of audio and re-encoding.

No piece of home entertainment electronics should control the volume of its output except the one that actually feeds the speakers. If there isn't a sound system in between your Apple TV and your speakers, volume is simply controlled by your TV's sound system.

VCR - No volume control.
DVD - No volume control.
Turntable - No volume control.

If you've ever experienced the pain of having separate volume controls for each device in your system, you would know why. Stop crying about this "feature". Apple will *never* add it because it would just be bad design.

If it's really that important to you, program your TV remote to control your Apple TV. Voila! One remote with volume and playback controls.

I'm pretty certain this is new, if you apply the show field on movies you can put things in their own sub-menus.

C'mon Apple, put a damn visualizer in your next ATV update. What the heck. Even my old 450 mHz Cube could run a half assed iTunes visualizer with that old PPC chip.

Boy, at the rate Apple releases AppleTV updates it might be worth plugging mine in sometime in 2012.