We have an old Apple TV, and it buffers because it has actually memory! And then we got a new one for the upstairs TV and it… does… not… buffer… SO IRRITATING!!! (Especially if your ISP throttles during prime time like ours does!)
We cut the cable this month. Currently using a Fire stick but might move that upstairs and get something else for the living room. Probably the Roku 4, though.
By making the set-top box a part of its giant app and services ecosystem, the company is moving Apple TV into a future that’s much broader and bigger than Roku’s or Amazon’s.
Doesn’t Roku run Linux? If so, I’d say that it’s at least equal in scale to what is available via Apple. Saying this as somebody who switched from Mac to Linux for daily use a year ago. Not trying to be fannish, I just thought it was a weird thing to say.
I’ll stick with my cheap Chinese Android box running Kodi, thank you very much. It drives me bonkers that none of the big brands will let me simply play a file that I have downloaded, sitting in a perfectly accessible share on my NAS drive, without having some kind of server running between.
Roku runs Linux, but in my experience, it’s not very extendable without getting into the guts of its OS, whereas the new Apple TV will have a library of custom-made games, apps, and channels created by Apple and third parties available for easy download.
I just recently figured out my own setup to use the Media Player on Xbox to play movies from the server, but I did have to run minidlna for the Xbox to see it (which might inform part of your annoyance as it did mine). Everybody’s racing to create their walled garden, and consumers can go to hell if they want to watch content they’ve purchased and stored locally.
I’m debating selling my PS3 for the new Apple TV. I don’t play many console games, but do spend quite a bit of time with iOS gaming; this seems like a neat adventure for mobile gaming.
More importantly, I pretty much only use the PS3 as a DLNA client and for Netflix; Apple TV can’t fare worse in those respects… I hope.
I pretty sure Plex and VLC have been confirmed for the Apple TV, so that should help. BTW, I have had pretty good results with Universal Media Server (an updated fork of the old PS3 media server, which oddly stopped workin with Windows 10).
It will likely all come down to the new Siri Remote design that the Apple TV v4 has and whether it improves the Netflix user experience.
Though it can’t possibly be worse than Netflix with the previous Apple Remote, which made the PS3’s interface a thing of beauty in comparison.
What, three hours and now one’s invoked Betteridge yet?
Doesn’t seem to be enough there to make me drop my Roku and switch… if I hadn’t already had a Roku…? then maybe.
Apple TV is a huge pile of crap. I got rid of all my Apple TV boxes and went with OnD Pro Android boxes. 4k, expandable memory, bluetooth ethernet and all the apps I could possible want. I wouldn’t touch another Apple product with a 10 foot pole.
I’m still using both of my Google TV Logitech Revues!
It gets a lot of hate online, but here it just works for web, Netflix, and playing USB files.
[quote=“beschizza, post:1, topic:68367, full:true”]
swiping left and right with the remote to select letters of the alphabet one at a time — you have no option to do this by speaking into the microphone or using a keyboard on a smartphone.[/quote]
I will wait to replace my old AppleTV until they come up with a better way to enter passwords / search terms. That one letter from the board at a time was old when I was a teenager at the arcade.
The Apple TV 3 uses a Bluetooth keyboard if you have one; I imagine the AppleTV 4 is the same.
Really? With Apple’s history of yanking VLC from the app store I’d be very surprised.
VLC was pulled over a conflict regarding how GNU-licensed software should exist on an App Store. It was one of those things where both sides were sort of at fault.
They have since sorted it out, and VLC is happily on the App Store (and apparently has an Apple Watch app).
The new iTV talks to your iphone/ipad over bluetooth. Fresh out of the box, if you have an ios device, it will prompt you on the device to type in your password info. And it has Siri built in, so you can speak your search terms to it if typing them in on your phone is a nuisance.
Neither Plex nor VLC can play files directly from a NAS share without requiring some sort of intermediate server, though. My Android boxes can play directly off the NAS share with no issues at all, and my dinky little NAS can’t really reliably run a DLNA client without completely barfing so that’s not really a solution for me either. So, for now, it’s cheap Chinese android boxes running Kodi. Sucks because my XBox One would EASILY be able to play those files, but MS doesn’t want people to have that functionality, for some reason. Bah.
