Apple has released Apple TV 2.2 which brings two new features, “Genius” and HD TV shows to the device. The update also addresses security flaws and fixes two separate issues where a maliciously crafted movie file could lead to either an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.
Genius feature instantly creates a playlist of other songs from your library “that go great together.” You will also notice a new “HD” option located in the TV purchases on the iTunes Store.
The Apple TV 2.2 update is available directly to the Apple TV and won’t appear in your computer’s Software Update application, or in the Apple Downloads web site.
The update brings improvements to the handling of atom length fields in movie codes and bounds checking of STSZ atoms. It also fixes an issue where openly a malicious PICT image may cause applications to quit unexpectedly.
Your Apple TV will update based on your automatic update settings or you can perform manual software update by navigating to Settings>General>About>Update Software.
Now if I could only buy HD TV, my wife doesn’t see it as an important upgrade.
I am running ATV on my old Sony in B/W, luminance only.
Have not downloaded it yet.
But it drives me crazy that AppleTV does not have the same cool visualizers as iTunes does.
The new visualizers in iTunes are cool and I wish my tv would have it while I listen to music.
Just silly it AppleTV doesn’t do it also.
Good idea MM.
Visualizer and some mushrooms.
mmmmmm……… shrooms
Uhh, who needs a visualizer when you have shrooms?
Just give me a moth and a light bulb to watch….
The cool visualizer on iTunes is directly driven by the GPU, so I would recommend the shrooms to get the same effect, because I doubt the GPU on the Apple TV has the muscle to pull it off.
Rob – Now if I could only buy HD TV, my wife doesn’t see it as an important upgrade.
I see two possible upgrades in your future…..
I am running ATV on my old Sony in B/W, luminance only.
When I first got mine, I bought a ATV S-Video converter for my 18-year-old 32″ Toshiba. Worked like a charm until I got a HDTV this summer.
I met a guy at a Van Halen concert in ’82.
He said he was on mushrooms and iron.
Something about that the vitamins enhanced the effect.
He was scary looking. His eyes were solid red.
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thethirdshoe
I recommend unplugging the iron whilst spaced.
You could end up with more than your eyes red….
In other news, AppleTV still sucks and is almost useless.
AppleTV is Apple’s most Sony-like product–an interesting piece of hardware intentionally crippled by retarded and artificial software limitations. Just absolutely pathetic.
Things I should be able to do with the AppleTV and can’t (either can’t do at all or can’t do without hacking the thing, and then seeing any hacks erased with each software update):
1) View DIVX video files. Don’t give me crap about these files being largely TV rips–there’s a commercially-released divx plugin for Leopard that installs with a couple of mouse clicks.
2) View hulu and other such sites straight from AppleTV. Why are companies that want to offer additional content through AppeTV forced to resort to USB dongle hacks?
3) Why do I need an Airport Extreme in an almost identical looking box when I already have an AppleTV. Why can’t I plug my cable modem into the AppleTV and then have the AppleTV share its wireless connection? There’s no hardware reason, just Apple again artificially limiting the machine.
4) I have a 500GB hard drive filled with mp4 video. Why can’t I just plug that into the USB port on the AppleTV, and browse the drive? Why do I need to plug the drive into a mac, have itunes running, load the files into itunes, and then share itunes just to browse and view my video files? I have a bunch of older macs around where I can have a desktop machine to do this, but how about all of those people that just have laptops? If all I had was my MacBook would I want to have to plug it in, leave it running, and plug a drive into it just to watch mp4 files on the AppleTV? Hell no.
5) Okay, I have gone to the trouble of buying an AppleTV, buying an airport base station, and buying a desktop mac. After investing in all that Apple hardware why can’t I just share a drive with the AppleTV using smb or apple file sharing? After all that Apple hardware can’t at least browse a shared drive instead of having to load everything into iTunes?
(Why wouldn’t I want to load everything into iTunes–well, I have a lot of stuff and iTunes is PAINFULLY SLOW processing lots of files, and the amount of material I have is just torture to do anything with on less than a dual core intel mac. And when accessing a shared Mac iTunes just SITS THERE processing for five, ten, fifteen minutes before displaying the shared Mac’s contents. (On the other hand Apple’s little iPhone remote program only needs a few second to load and process the library, this last fact causing me to abandon AppleTV as a way of remote playing music. Why waste time with slow-ass AppleTV when I can just use the remote program to have my iTunes server desktop mac output to my stereo using an old airport express?)
6) Again, why can’t I use AppleTV to watch DVD folders? I can do that in Front Row, after all.
I can’t remember the last time I used AppleTV. I have one, bought the day they came out, and right now I can’t even remember where the thing is. All the hardware is there for the AppleTV to be tremendously useful, particularly for mac users whose primary machine is a laptop, but there are so many artificial software limitations that thing is near useless.
AppleTV should have the brick nickname, except that a more accurate name would be shitbrick.
I just want parental controls on an tv so I can load up my pr0n while keeping it reasonably hidden so “Anal Action” and “Asian Amatuers” stops being the first two movies on my list.
Not a single “snappier” comment? I’m shocked. Just shocked.
To OpJ. Sounds like you want AppleTV to steal content. Oh well.
As a side note – I saw my first zune in the wild today…
I am with Tommy Boy.
My torrent and usenet porn dvds are begging to be on my AppleTV, but I can’t since the kids could watch them. So I have to load them when we want them and then remove them after we are done. Pain in the butt. hee hee.
We need locked folders.
forgot to mention when we make our own home made movies, can’t add those either.
opj is spot on in his comments…
I hope these are heard by someone in a position to act on these suggestions,,, at least some of them.
Don’t update to Apple TV 2.2!!!
I did and my Apple TV would just reboot continuously with the Apple logo on the screen. I had to hold down menu and “-” to reboot it, ran diagnostics, and then did a restore which installed version 2.02 on it. Unfortunately now I have to re-sync over 30GB of music and photo. The apple discussion boards http://discussions.apple.com is full of people having issues with 2.2.
I will wait for a fix from Apple before updating it again.
Everything started working again after about 90 minutes. Since all of the affected Apple TVs came back up at the same time, it obviously points to a server issue on Apple’s end that caused all of the problems.
The bigger question now has to be, why did a server outage kill so many Apple TVs to the point where they wouldn’t even function at all? Do they phone home when they boot up and won’t function if they get no answer? That certainly seems to be the case.
Update went perfect. HD TV episodes available for perusal. Syncing between tv and iTunes. Everything is very snappy.
RL, Thanks for the info.
If that’s the case I will check the discussion boards and try to update again. After I installed 2.2 it booted up and was working, I then tried to watch a TV show I purchased and it hung. That’s when I reset it and it just began rebooting over and over.
Then I restored 2.02 back on the Apple TV. If I have time later I will try to re-install 2.2.