AppleTV some oddities

[lparsons21]

I have 2 AppleTVs, the original one with 40Gb HD and the ATV3.

Just got the old one out the other day, dusted it off and plugged it in. WOW! I had forgotten just how crude that little bugger was...

Here's some oddities I found on both that I wasn't aware of.

1. With original AppleTV, it mounts in iTunes and will sync movies to the HD. That was the reason I bought it way back when. So I plugged in and it synced my selected movies to the internal HD, showed the ones still available for streaming with the shared iTunes library, BUT the 3 movies I just bought don't show up in it at all.

Read all over the place for answers. Lots of answers mostly of the very vague type. It seems, though I cannot confirm, that at least some of the new movies are using a form of DRM that the original AppleTV just doesn't like and won't deal with.

2. The ATV3 and ATV2 do not mount in iTunes though there are posts from some who swear they will. I called Apple and they confirmed that it won't mount. What that means is that with these two versions of the AppleTV is that items rented and downloaded on the computer iTunes are not viewable as a selection on the ATV2 & 3. Airplay is the only option.

Note this is only an issue with rented movies, purchased movies show up in the shared library as well as in the cloud. I keep thinking that this is some sort of later change as I thought I had rented some movies in the past on the computer and played them straight up on the ATV3.

 

[mike123abc]

If you do not download them to the PC you can stream them to the ATV. I never download to the computer anymore. I will only download to the iPad if I am going on a trip and want some PPV for the trip (I guess computer could be laptop too for traveling).

 

[lparsons21]

With the AppleTV 2 & 3, you can buy and download on the computer and still stream them from the cloud.

With AppleTV 1st Gen, at least some movies will not play or be seen if you download them to the computer. In iTunes you can select the new movies to sync to the ATV1, but it won't do it. And with the ATV1, you have no access to the cloud since it was never updated to see the cloud.

What I don't know and may try today, is if I select the movie to purchase in the movie selection (note NOT 'My Movies'), if it will then download to the ATV1 and play without paying a 2nd time.
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[lparsons21]

OK, I went to the AppleTV 1st Gen and selected one of the movies I recently purchased that would not sync from the computer to the ATV1. Told it to buy again and it then informed me I already purchased it, did I want to download it to the ATV1. It is in the process of doing that now.

After this is complete, I'll try the rent the el-cheapo I got yesterday that still has time on it to see if the same process happens. At worst it won't and I'll be out $0.99!!

The iTunes Store seems to be pretty damned smartly setup. I inadvertantly selected 'rent' of the movie I had purchased and it prompted that I already owned it and did I really want to 'rent' it.

 

[mike123abc]

For movies you own that is true, you can download multiple times to the PC (5 device limit), and watch on ATV from the cloud. PPV is just treated differently.

 

[lparsons21]

Yeah, I figured that out. Currently Apple's thinking is you watch it from where you 'rented' it. IOW, if I rent on the Mac, then Airplay is the only way to get it on the ATV3, but I could rent it on the ATV3 and wait awhile and watch it there straight up. Which is probably what I should do.

With the 1st Gen AppleTV you could rent it on the Mac then use the 'transfer' function in iTunes. While that function still exists, it doesn't work on the ATV 1st Gen, though it does for the iPad/iPhone. Oddly if you try to transfer to the AppleTV 1st Gen it acts like it should work, but when you tell it to do it, it just doesn't happen.

While I really like the ATV3, the 1st Gen's had their own appeal. Primarily that I could copy a purchased movie, music, or TV show to it and then haul it with me and plug it in to almost any TV and watch away from home. There was also hacks out that you could use to do different things on it, though most of them didn't work all that well because Apple never published the GPU hooks so the other software guys could take advantage of it.
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[mike123abc]

The best thing that happened to iTunes is when they went back and put all your shows and movies into the cloud. Used to be you had to download to the computer and that was it. It was refreshing to see stuff from long ago suddenly appear in my new cloud library when they introduced the service. FOX was a holdout for a while, but now all their movies are there too.

 

[lparsons21]

Yep, I agree. It is great that it is all in the cloud. Though at home, I don't prefer to use it that way as my service is only 6Mb DSL so movies take quite awhile to get in place for playing. Because of that, I tend to download to the Mac and use the shared iTunes library.

I have my iTunes library on a 2TB networked drive, so space isn't a real issue.
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