I had a slight windfall earlier this week and decided to splurge on some new home automation stuff: a new AppleTV 4K and an Eve Energy smart plug.
I already have the old versions of these: the first generation AppleTV 4K that I got in 2018 when I upgraded my TV watching to 4K, and a couple of Eve Energy smart plugs that work over bluetooth, not sure when I got those.
The new AppleTV 4K is a little less tall than the old one and on the back the ports are rearranged. Otherwise you'd be forgiven for thinking nothing had changed in the better part of a decade. I believe it now does HDR10+ as well as SDR, regular HDR and Dolby Vision, but does anyone really care? Most stuff was fast enough on the old one, but some apps not so much. Those are a lot faster on the new one.
Although I never hated the old remote like many people did, the new one is better. Except... that it won't control the volume on my LG OLED TV from 2018 through HDMI??? It will happily control the volume of my Onkyo receiver and the mute button is a nice addition in that case, though. The old one would just control the Onky if turned on and the LG if the receiver was in standby/passthrough mode. The new one won't even do volume on the TV without the Onkyo in the middle.
Anyone know what's up with this?
Fortunately the "computers" app is still there so you can stream from your media library formerly known as iTunes, but it's really annoying how the libraries appear and disappear as the computer hosting them sleeps.
I'd say that these days almost 200 euros for this particular streaming box is extremely hard to justify. The AppleTV app on a smart TV will stream Apple stuff no problem. And of course all the other streaming stuff. Streaming media from aniTunes library is an exercise in frustration due to the above mentioned sleep related connectivity issues and because Apple's SSD prices are so insane that nobody is going to upgrade their Mac's storage just for this.
Airplay also works just fine directly to my LG TV for screen sharing or to the Onkyo receiver for music playing. And as mentioned before, I like Jellyfin a lot as a media server system, which can run on my NAS as well as Mac/Win/Linux. And just playing video directly from a USB stick.
The advantage of playing video directly on the TV is that this avoids any framerate issues. The AppleTV is capable of adjusting its video framerate to the content. In practice this works well for movies, less well for TV shows, it doesn't really work for many apps such as Dutch public broadcasting and it either doesn't work or is a disaster on Youtube, or both.
"How can it not work and still be a disaster?" I imagine you asking. First of all, note that Youtube content covers the full range of framerates. There is some 60 FPS stuff, 30 FPS stuff (movie/TV commentators seem to like that even though the 24 FPS movie/TV clips converted to 30 FPS look like ass), a little 24 FPS but here in Europe also a good amount of 25 FPS content.
At some point Youtube honored the AppleTV 4K setting to adjust the screen to the content framerate. This means a black screen for a few seconds when the screen needs to be set to a new framerate. I think they no longer do this. But the ads are flagged as "premium content" and thus trigger some kind of framerate change (although the framerate doesn't always seem to be different) so you miss the first few seconds of the ad (who cares) and the content after the ad (painful!).
I would love it so much if I could set the framerate and framerate adjustment per app. But obviously that is never going to happen. Second best thing: just watch this stuff using the LG app which seems to handle the issue without blackouts.
The good thing is that the new AppleTV seems to use 20% less electricity than the old one. Yeah, 1.05 vs 1.25 W in standby is really going to make a difference! (Ok, this is a case of Apple getting it right early on, that's actually a good thing.)
The main reason I got this new AppleTV 4K is for all the new Matter and Thread goodness. Turns out this is somewhat hard to enable. I also got that new Matter/Thread-enabled Eve Energy. Initially it wouldn't pair because apparently there was no thread border router. (Not that Apple stuff provides error messages this concise.) Turns out you enable Thread on your AppleTV 4K by selecting a Homekit room. But doing that as part of the initial installation isn't good enough. So first change that initial room to something else, then change it back, now you can pair your Thread smart home thingy, and you're in business. Use the Eve app to get much more info than what Apple's Home app will give you.
I already have the old versions of these: the first generation AppleTV 4K that I got in 2018 when I upgraded my TV watching to 4K, and a couple of Eve Energy smart plugs that work over bluetooth, not sure when I got those.
The new AppleTV 4K is a little less tall than the old one and on the back the ports are rearranged. Otherwise you'd be forgiven for thinking nothing had changed in the better part of a decade. I believe it now does HDR10+ as well as SDR, regular HDR and Dolby Vision, but does anyone really care? Most stuff was fast enough on the old one, but some apps not so much. Those are a lot faster on the new one.
Although I never hated the old remote like many people did, the new one is better. Except... that it won't control the volume on my LG OLED TV from 2018 through HDMI??? It will happily control the volume of my Onkyo receiver and the mute button is a nice addition in that case, though. The old one would just control the Onky if turned on and the LG if the receiver was in standby/passthrough mode. The new one won't even do volume on the TV without the Onkyo in the middle.
Anyone know what's up with this?
Fortunately the "computers" app is still there so you can stream from your media library formerly known as iTunes, but it's really annoying how the libraries appear and disappear as the computer hosting them sleeps.
I'd say that these days almost 200 euros for this particular streaming box is extremely hard to justify. The AppleTV app on a smart TV will stream Apple stuff no problem. And of course all the other streaming stuff. Streaming media from an
Airplay also works just fine directly to my LG TV for screen sharing or to the Onkyo receiver for music playing. And as mentioned before, I like Jellyfin a lot as a media server system, which can run on my NAS as well as Mac/Win/Linux. And just playing video directly from a USB stick.
The advantage of playing video directly on the TV is that this avoids any framerate issues. The AppleTV is capable of adjusting its video framerate to the content. In practice this works well for movies, less well for TV shows, it doesn't really work for many apps such as Dutch public broadcasting and it either doesn't work or is a disaster on Youtube, or both.
"How can it not work and still be a disaster?" I imagine you asking. First of all, note that Youtube content covers the full range of framerates. There is some 60 FPS stuff, 30 FPS stuff (movie/TV commentators seem to like that even though the 24 FPS movie/TV clips converted to 30 FPS look like ass), a little 24 FPS but here in Europe also a good amount of 25 FPS content.
At some point Youtube honored the AppleTV 4K setting to adjust the screen to the content framerate. This means a black screen for a few seconds when the screen needs to be set to a new framerate. I think they no longer do this. But the ads are flagged as "premium content" and thus trigger some kind of framerate change (although the framerate doesn't always seem to be different) so you miss the first few seconds of the ad (who cares) and the content after the ad (painful!).
I would love it so much if I could set the framerate and framerate adjustment per app. But obviously that is never going to happen. Second best thing: just watch this stuff using the LG app which seems to handle the issue without blackouts.
The good thing is that the new AppleTV seems to use 20% less electricity than the old one. Yeah, 1.05 vs 1.25 W in standby is really going to make a difference! (Ok, this is a case of Apple getting it right early on, that's actually a good thing.)
The main reason I got this new AppleTV 4K is for all the new Matter and Thread goodness. Turns out this is somewhat hard to enable. I also got that new Matter/Thread-enabled Eve Energy. Initially it wouldn't pair because apparently there was no thread border router. (Not that Apple stuff provides error messages this concise.) Turns out you enable Thread on your AppleTV 4K by selecting a Homekit room. But doing that as part of the initial installation isn't good enough. So first change that initial room to something else, then change it back, now you can pair your Thread smart home thingy, and you're in business. Use the Eve app to get much more info than what Apple's Home app will give you.
