After a few weeks of my 3 year old Android TV having ads and having choppy animations, I bought the new Apple TV. In the last month we haven't watched anything on the base Android TV interface. Apple TV is smoother, easier to find what we want, and interfaces for HBO Max look better.

This is supporting my believe that expensive (durable) goods like TVs, cars, and appliances should have an external control hardware for their smarts that can be upgraded every few years. This would allow the good to last 10+ years without a crappy experience after the first 2 years.

Cars yes please. I remember when people bought aftermarket car stereos, was great. I really dont like today's integrated entertainment, they dont work that will and in 10 years will look terrible.

I have an Apple TV and I want to like it, but the remote is utter garbage. Every time I so much as brush against it, it does some weird shit, like pause playback, go into fast forward, change the program or whatever... so then there's a mad scramble "where's that fucking remote?" as I try to figure out what appendage touched it so I can find it and undo whatever it decided to do. I'm afraid to stretch my legs or arms for fear of breaking playback.

Amazon got their remote right. Everything is an actual BUTTON and there aren't too many of them. Absolutely no complaints with that.

I also loathed those remotes but bit the bullet and bought the new ones. Am very happy with it and haven’t experienced any of the issues with the old one.

Apple updates the remote in the most recent Apple TV model, and it’s backwards compatible and sold separately.

This $10 replacement GE remote is somehow 500x better. My Apple TV experience was dramatically improved.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HSSAZX8

Argh. Some of us just hate this traditional controller design. It’s huge but the buttons are small, wiggly, there are too many and it gets dirty as hell. I’d rather use a PlayStation controller as remote, all you needs is two buttons and a directional pad anyway.

The latest version of the Apple remote has ditched the touch pad, and has buttons again.

Your cries have been heard. You want one these:

https://function101.com/pages/button-remote-for-apple-tv-hom...

I tried moving my Apple TV to another room and relying upon "Chromecast with Google TV" on the main set. Not only is the device laggy, but everything just looks worse. It claims to support HDR, 4:2:2, etc, but the end result is that I immediately found the experience far inferior.

Add that the AppleTV has long had sound synchronization, now it has automatic color correction as well.

It's a very nice device. The remote was absolutely trash before -- good god I hate that remote -- but the new one looks significantly improved. And you can connect a controller to it and play a pretty wide variety of fairly decent games if you want, which is an experience that I imagine will improve over time.

It's nearly perfect now that they've fixed the remote, and absolutely the device to beat at the moment.

Most of the "channel" apps are also very nice, the exception being Amazon's clunky Prime Video app. The Plex client is quite good too.

> Most of the "channel" apps are also very nice, the exception being Amazon's clunky Prime Video app.

To be fair, I've not seen any other platform where Prime Video's interface isn't terrible, and that's including Fire-whatevers. Been that way for years. I guess it's working OK for them, since they don't seem inclined to fix it. In particular, they probably regard making it hard to tell whether something's free-with-Prime or pay-per-view until the moment you choose whether to play it, as a feature.

If you want an app that supports Plex/Emby/Jellyfin as well as direct network storage, Infuse is unbeatable in my opinion.

The plex client is rock solid

I bought an Nvidia Shield because the Plex client can switch the display's refresh rate to match the content (no judder for 24p content). Based on [1], it sounds like that should be possible with the Apple TV, too. Can anyone confirm if this works well?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208288

I can't confirm with Plex specifically, but I can tell you content matching is an OS-level feature, not specific to apps. It works for the apps I've tried.

Thanks. I'm going to give the Apple TV a shot. If frame rate matching works well in other apps, it will probably be good in Plex, too.

Apple tv has plex?!! I'm getting one!

Basically every streaming device has a Plex app: https://www.plex.tv/apps-devices/

Would use of an Android phone have any cause for frustration with an Apple TV? I'd assume not but I've never used one.

Not really, you lose the remote app on your phone, which is useful to enter passwords, but using the voice dictation to enter a password a character at a time works surprisingly well.

You'd also not have airplay and mirroring. That might be a bigger deal for some, but for me, it's a feature I basically never use.

The YouTube apps on Android and iOS support streaming to the Apple TV YouTube app, which seems to be the bulk of what my guests and I want to actually stream. If you have a local media library, or tend to want to stream your computer screen to your TV for unsupported media/sources (or for plain mirroring), lack of AirPlay might be more important to you.

You won't be able to use your phone as a remote, or to enter passwords, but other than that, there would be no frustration.

You will not be able to mirror your phone screen or cast anything from YouTube or any other cast supported app.

If it’s like the older Apple TV’s no. It comes with its own remote, the only iPhone integration is that your phone becomes an extra remote should the original be lost or broken

It works with a lot of TV remotes, I rarely use the Apple one.

No, Apple TV doesn't require any other Apple devices. It will prompt you for an iCloud account during setup, but you can create a free one or just not have one.

I guess you would not be able to stream your display to the Apple TV, and you would not be able to use your phone for keyboard input, and probably more. Just get an iPhone already!

I've been looking into getting one, but my one hangup is still the lack of audio passthrough support. I have some UHD disks that I've digitized and without passthrough, the Atmos metadata will be lost on playback.

I found this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204069

Is there something I'm missing?

Can you watch porn on that? Can you stream random online media? Really curious, I do things on my TV I don't see working in a typical apple eco system

You can AirPlay whatever you'd like from your iOS, iPadOS, or macOS device.

at least Sky in the UK explicitly block you from using airplay when the app is running. They detect airplay in use and overlay a gray box on the content. I’ve seen no work around for this and suspect it’s a sign of things to come for other broadcasters and media houses.

Which do not have porn apps either. But I can over complicate everything by streaming my safari session I guess?

I guess safari supports porn

You can Airplay any video content from the web, or mirror the screen.

So I use another device to browse and the TV only for watching. I get it, sounds annoying just to enjoy some porn

There’s always infuse player and plex, into which you could place whichever pornography your heart desires.

You can install VLC and enter arbitrary stream URLs to watch.

You can also use Plex to access a media server with whatever you want to put on it.

So no porn streaming at all?

Does VLC on Apple TV support all VLC codecs?

Sorry I don't know what you specifically mean by "porn streaming" are you talking about a dedicated app for a specific streaming service?

If so, I highly doubt Apple would allow those on their platform but I've never actually checked. There are semi-sketchy IPTV clients that you can use to watch what seems to be unofficial streaming services, so perhaps those can also be used to watch what you want?

As for VLC, it's open source I encourage you to do your own research as I can't answer your codecs question with confidence.

Well if I watch porn I don't download it and watch it later, but open some place app or website and browse videos on my TV to fap to comfortably from my couch.

To be fair my question is already answered, no porn support. You need a another device to stream from.

Is the Apple TV better than the Nvidia Shield? I bought one of the tubes and that thing is slick as hell.

I have the tube sitting right beside my new Apple TV right now. No comparison to me. Apple TV is smoother, voice input is way ahead, and the Dolby stuff is way better than the Nividia processing

Interesting, thanks!

How does the upscaling on apple tv compare to Nvidia shield's ai upscaling?

It appears to be quite a bit better. I had been considering upgrading my TV while on the NVIDIA, but haven't considered it since moving to the new Apple TV

At least in one user's opinion, it's superior: https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/ijjgms/apple_tv_4k...

Does it support AI-Upscale?