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GoDucks · Mar 24, 2007, 12:32 AM

Just got my Apple TV today and have just spent a few hours playing with it. Overall, I'm very impressed but I have a couple of questions / issues with it.

(1) It seems as though the Apple TV cannot access my iTunes library on my iMac to stream video/music if the iMac is asleep. My iMac was on and iTunes was running but the iMac had gone to sleep. I had to go into the other room and wake it up before I could connect to it from the Apple TV. Not the end of the world but a little frustrating. (On the plus side, when streaming videos, the speed was great - it never took more that 2-3 seconds for any video to start and I never saw the video skip/pause, etc. when streaming.

(2) I have ripped about 200 TV episodes from DVD's that I own. Within iTunes, I have created folders and playlists within the folders for each season of a particular TV show. I also have different playlists for different types of movies. When I accessed the Apple TV settings within iTunes to select what I wanted to transfer to the Apple TV, I was able to chose by movie playlist. However, when I'm within the Apple TV menu (both accessing the Apple TV drive or accessing my iTunes library, I'm presented only with the list of "movies" in one single list. Again - it's a little annoying that I have to scroll through 200 movies or TV shows to get to the one I want. Anyone figure out how to get video playlists to appear within the movie or TV show folders within the Apple TV menu?

Other than these two issues, I'm loving this device !!!

Parky · Mar 24, 2007, 07:03 AM

Originally Posted by GoDucks

Just got my Apple TV today and have just spent a few hours playing with it. Overall, I'm very impressed but I have a couple of questions / issues with it.

(1) It seems as though the Apple TV cannot access my iTunes library on my iMac to stream video/music if the iMac is asleep. My iMac was on and iTunes was running but the iMac had gone to sleep. I had to go into the other room and wake it up before I could connect to it from the Apple TV. Not the end of the world but a little frustrating. (On the plus side, when streaming videos, the speed was great - it never took more that 2-3 seconds for any video to start and I never saw the video skip/pause, etc. when streaming.

(2) I have ripped about 200 TV episodes from DVD's that I own. Within iTunes, I have created folders and playlists within the folders for each season of a particular TV show. I also have different playlists for different types of movies. When I accessed the Apple TV settings within iTunes to select what I wanted to transfer to the Apple TV, I was able to chose by movie playlist. However, when I'm within the Apple TV menu (both accessing the Apple TV drive or accessing my iTunes library, I'm presented only with the list of "movies" in one single list. Again - it's a little annoying that I have to scroll through 200 movies or TV shows to get to the one I want. Anyone figure out how to get video playlists to appear within the movie or TV show folders within the Apple TV menu?

Other than these two issues, I'm loving this device !!!

How the hell did you expect the content of you iMac Hard Drive to stream from the computer when it is asleep!! It's OFF, not operating, drive is powered down, hence can't transfer data !

GoDucks · Mar 24, 2007, 07:35 AM

I didn't expect to be able to stream when it's asleep but I was hoping that the Apple TV would be able to send a signal through the network to wake up the iMac. If my iMac is asleep and I point my remote at it, the signal from the remote will wake up the iMac and if I launch front row, it's smart enough to launch iTunes in the background so I can access my video/music. With the Apple TV, it isn't. It would be nice if something similar could happen with the Apple TV.

torifile · Mar 24, 2007, 09:05 AM

Have you tried checking the "wake for administrator access" in the energy pref pane on your iMac? I have no idea if that'll wake the computer, but it's worth a try.

edit: On further exploration, it looks like you've got to send what's called a "wake-on-LAN" packet to wake the computer up. I wonder if there's some way to hack the AppleTV to send this signal. I'm not hopeful. Seems like a shortcoming that is best addressed with Apple.

GoDucks · Mar 24, 2007, 09:57 AM

Thanks for the information on the wake up from sleep. I've answered half of my first question myself... For some reason, I had all my ripped TV shows in the movies library. I changed the tags so they now show in the TV Show section and they are being grouped very nicely. I'm still looking for a way to group movies within the Apple TV menu though so I can have all childrens movies together, all action movies together, etc...

If Apple doesn't address the sleep issue, I may just hack the Apple TV and put in a 750 Gig drive or something...

Cadaver · Mar 24, 2007, 10:39 AM

You can't send a wake-on-LAN signal over wireless. Requires a hardwired connection.

GoDucks · Mar 24, 2007, 12:22 PM

I think I've found a solution that works for me for now...

I've turned off the sleep function on my iMac and activated the energy saver function that turns off the display after 5 minutes of inactivity. That way I can leave iTunes running in the background but not have the display turned off when I'm not using the computer.