Saturday, February 16, 2013

Breaking in the new TV

I'm the proud recipient of an Apple TV ( TV ), thanks to my family and an early birthday present.

It's a thing of beauty, and very very easy to set up.

I plugged it into my telly via HDMI, added some power and c'est voila.

It automagically picked up my wireless, so I entered the WPA2 key, and we're all up and running.

The built-in apps are pretty neat, although it'd be nice to have some UK content, along with the US-centric stuff such as MLB.tv ( whatever that is ) and WSJ ( Wall Street Journal ).

However, Vimeo is rather lovely, fewer cat videos than YouTube.

The main reason for the purchase was to allow me to play my own content, and also stream various UK TV services such as BBC iPlayer, 4oD, Five, ITV Player etc.

This is very easy using the TV's built-in AirPlay service, which allows one to use the nadger as a wireless display and a set of speakers.

I started by connecting the MacBook up to the telly, using AirPlay, before going to the next level and doing the same thing with the iPhone.

One thing that did catch me out with AirPlay on both the iPhone and the iPads was the fact that I could hear the audio from the iDevice, but not see the video.

Being a techie, I started by updating the TV's software to the latest version, which made no difference.

It took me a few minutes to realise that, whilst I'd enabled AirPlay, I'd not clicked on the Mirroring button: -


Did I feel silly ?

Oh yes :-)

In other related news, Apple also have a rather useful Remote app that allows one to drive the TV ( and other iDevices ) from an iPhone or iPad.

Given how small the remote is: -


that's a pretty useful thing to have - I can imagine losing the remote quite easily :-)

So I know that it's possible to "crack" the TV ( aka Jail Breaking ), but I'm not yet ready for that, especially as I have the Raspberry Pi and Raspbmc to play with :-)

More to follow ….


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