Next, you see on the TV screen a list of WiFi networks from which Apple TV wants you to select one to join. You choose your network and enter a password if needed.
You then go to iTunes on your computer and turn on Home Sharing (Advanced menu -> Turn On Home Sharing). After you type in your Apple ID and password and click Create Home Share, all you have to do is click on the Done button.
Back at the Apple TV, you then use its remote to navigate to Settings > Computers, choose Turn On Home Sharing, and use the onscreen keyboard to enter your Apple ID and password.
That's it! Your computer will now show up under Computers in Apple TV's main menu. Just choose it, and you'll see on the TV screen a list of categories (Music, Movies, TV shows, etc.) that give you access to all your streamable goodies. The Apple TV is in business ... and you don't even have to tell iTunes to sync content to it.
That's because the new Apple TV does not have an onboard hard drive or any other kind of storage. You can't sync content to it. Everything it plays is streamed to it.
It streams any content which your computer's iTunes app has to offer — music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, photos, etc. Right out of the box, I tried Apple TV with iTunes movies and found it worked smoothly, much more so than my Gen One Apple TV ever did. One thing I liked especially: when you fast-forward through a movie, the new Apple TV lets you move into material that it has yet to buffer. The screen goes dark, but the time indicator at the bottom of the screen shows you exactly where you are. When you get to the point in time at which you want to resume play, you just press the remote's Play button and regular Apple TV streaming with picture and sound resumes instantly from that very point.
You can buy or rent movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store and watch them instantly. You can watch Netflix Instant streams and screen YouTube videos. You can listen to Internet radio. You can search for and view Flickr images. (Yet the new Apple TV doesn't do Pandora or Rhapsody!?!)
At the App Store, Apple offers an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app called Remote that lets your iDevice stand in for the Apple TV's remote control. One advantage: you don't have to be in the same room, so you can control (say) what track or playlist is playing while you are dicing onions in the kitchen. (Don't forget to wipe your hands first.)
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| Apple's promotional AirPlay image |
Tap the AirPlay icon seen at the right of the row of controls in the image above, and a menu pops up on the screen of the iPhone (or whatever iOS-based iDevice you're using) allowing you to redirect both audio and video to "Apple TV" (unless you've gone to the trouble to rename the device more descriptively). Like magic, the picture and sound start playing right on your TV, via the Apple TV. Technically, what's happening is that your iDevice is "pushing" the content to the Apple TV, which accepts and plays the content in the same way as it would if the Apple TV itself were "pulling" the content from iTunes on your home computer.
You can even use Apple TV's remote to do things like pause and resume playback, fast forward and reverse, go forward and back a chapter at a time, etc.
It's a neat trick, and it even works for YouTube. But — and this is my biggest gripe — for most other iDevice video players, including QuickTime running in Safari, it only forwards the audio, not the video, to the Apple TV. The video keeps playing, but it's on the little screen of the iDevice.
I was hoping to (see The Marvelous Air Video App: It Streams Videos from Your Mac or PC to iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) get the Air Video app to do the AirPlay thing with both video and audio. No such luck. It forwards only the audio to the Apple TV. (Or maybe it is forwarding the video, but Apple TV is ignoring it.)
It's not a deal breaker, and I'm not going to return my new Apple TV for a refund. Yet it's an ugly fly in the ointment. Why in the world would Apple not get the AirPlay icon working identically for all video apps?
Here's more coverage of AirPlay with Apple TV, including more information about the flaw:
- Apple TV's AirPlay video--not quite fully baked
- AirPlay video: what works and what doesn't
- Hands on with AirPlay for Apple TV
- Video Support for AirPlay Is Limited in iOS 4.2
- Hands-on with AirPlay and Apple TV
CNET's review of the new Apple TV was filed before Apple delivered on its (at that time) still-promised AirPlay capability, so it doesn't mention the flaw ... but the review is still well worth reading.
BTW, a like anomaly is that you can use AirPlay to "push" photos stored on your computer to the Apple TV ... but AirPlay won't do the same for iPhone-shot photos and videos that are still stored on your iPhone.
You can use iDevice-based apps such as Pandora and Rhapsody to fill in for such capabilities as are regrettably missing on the Apple TV itself ... but the Apple TV will irritatingly display "Unknown Artist" and "Unknown Track" for music sent to it from such third-party music apps.
And, on the plus side, when you can get AirPlay to stream videos or audios properly from iDevice to Apple TV, you can then proceed to use your iDevice for other purposes such as browsing in Safari. AirPlay does its magic "in the background" on the iDevice.
What no one seems to know is whether the current glaring AirPlay-to-Apple-TV insufficiencies can simply vanish if Apple updates its iOS operating system that runs the iDevices, and/or the Apple TV software itself. If not, then app developers might have to re-jigger their apps to get it all working right ... not optimal, from the point of view of impatient users like me.
Or ... will this turn out to be a permanent gap between the ideal and the real, along the lines of iDevices' lingering inability to play Flash web videos?
