Apple TV 4K

[L. Langer]

The problem with Apple is that they are madly, deeply, passionately, and creepily in love with H.265, which most other companies have abandoned due to the patent trolls - of which Apple is a member - that killed it by threating financial sodomy - the fees were pretty bonkers - upon those who dared to use HEVC for offering video content downloads. Because Apple won't join the AOM to get AV1 and the ATV does not have enough storage to make it practical, 4K downloads won't be happening on this model of Apple TV, though they could use AV1 with hybrid video decoding, if the GPU horsepower is there. AV1 encoding hardware and software will be pretty solid by the time the next ATV rolls out in two years, so I think we'll see 4K downloads on that model, with the current one getting a software update to enable it before the next model is released, just as HEVC decoding was enabled on the 4th generation ATV.

 

[L. Langer]

Great news! Apple has joined the AOMedia group and will be bringing the royalty-free AV1 to Apple TV and iTunes in the not too distant future. AOMedia will be at CES, giving an off-site presentation at a nearby hotel, if anyone is interested in seeing what's up. The initial codec - 1.0 - is rumored to be locked down at the end of the month in order to move forward with implementation in software encoder/decoder implementations serving the immediate needs of the industry and consumers, with hardware encoder/decoder implementations coming in 2019/2020.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Any one jail breaked your apple TV 4k´s?

I wanted to load files to it to use it as a video server for a convention center thing but realize that´s not really possible without bumping the firmware. So ended up buying one of these, I guess its also more failsafe for power downs and such. Simply just plays the file on the card in loop as soon as it gets power.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00US52AJ6?ref_=pe_2640190_233158700_shiptrack_e_304_dt_1

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Why do you need to jailbreak to play your own files? Can’t you just stream your content from an iTunes library as we’ve done in the past. I have not tried it with the new 4K model yet, but have not seen any reports that it doesn’t work. Now I don’t see it looping or doing what you’d want for convention center use right out of the box. But this doesn’t seem like a jailbreak situation, more of a “Let’s make a convention center / trade show app that can loop our content” situation.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Why do you need to jailbreak to play your own files? Can’t you just stream your content from an iTunes library as we’ve done in the past. I have not tried it with the new 4K model yet, but have not seen any reports that it doesn’t work. Now I don’t see it looping or doing what you’d want for convention center use right out of the box. But this doesn’t seem like a jailbreak situation, more of a “Let’s make a convention center / trade show app that can loop our content” situation.

Yes you can hack it together... But if you rely on the staff at an italian convention centre... that also have 5 tV´s to turn on each morning and lots of other stuff... filling drinks and so on. You dont want to teach them how to get the projector running, choose input, start apple TV, start an Ipad, and then play the file on the iPad with Apple TV link on in a loop clip app... I actually did that as a backup plan but this Little box above... is the only thing that starts to loop a mov file as soon as it gets power. Pretty neat if you ask me.


The apps to use if you want to do it with apple TV from the iPad was Apple TV remote and Loopido. Loopidio works great actually.

Then there is one app, forgot the name of it that actually goes around the whole thing and let you upload files to the hard drive of your apple TV.... But for some reason it could not find the files on my computer... it needed the IP address or such and actually got in but only saw empty folders where I had the files. Might have been some file ending prefix problem or such. But did not have time to investigate further... if that one actually works wich they show it does in the tutorial then thats the one if using APPLE TV for such purpose.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yes you can hack it together... But if you rely on the staff at an italian convention centre... that also have 5 tV´s to turn on each morning and lots of other stuff... filling drinks and so on. You dont want to teach them how to get the projector running, choose input, start apple TV, start an Ipad, and then play the file on the iPad with Apple TV link on in a loop clip app... I actually did that as a backup plan but this Little box above... is the only thing that starts to loop a mov file as soon as it gets power. Pretty neat if you ask me.

Oh, yeah, if you put it like that. Haha...