But all I keep seeing are articles that are regurgitations of Apple PR. I’ve tried to find information about app support for AirPlay video.
I’ve dutifully checked the Apple App Store for updates to the Netflix, HuluPlus and PlayOn apps and have so far only found a Netflix update, which I downloaded, tried and found only audio AirPlay support. But when I selected it, only audio was transferred to the Apple TV. I had tried clicking the icon back when the iPad was running iOS 4.2 and was excited to see AppleTV as a choice. The show view reveals the AirPlay icon, but only when viewed with an iOS device. Although this isn’t the most beautiful interface, it’s waaaay better than the Roku app interface shown below. I first tried Firefox 3.6.15, but everything in the top navigation area unded up in a jumble overlapping the all-important back navigation button.
But if you point any browser to m. and have a PlayOn server running on your LAN, you’ll end up at a screen similar to the one below that I took with Safari. I decided to try an iPad / AirPlay / AppleTV2 approach after being pointed to PlayOn’s built-in web interface, which is primarily intended for mobile devices. The iOS 4.3 developer release notes, however, read to me like video format support is pretty limited. It allegedly has "improved" AirPlay support for video, but it’s hard to find out exactly what has been improved. I’ve been waiting for Apple’s iOS 4.3, which finally was released last Tuesday.
PROBLEMS WITH NEW PLAYON TV ANDROID
But Roku’s sales volume is miniscule compared to the Wii and iOS and Android devices, which is where MediaMall will be spending their app development dollars this year. PlayOn says they could do a lot better with a properly-developed Roku app (the current one was done by a Roku / PlayOn enthusiast on his own). But the Roku PlayOn app user interface is so awful that I know it will have a huge negative WAF, so I’m not even going there. In the last post, I explored MediaMall’s PlayOn as a way to expand the Roku’s repetoire. Although Netflix announced a CBS deal in February, it’s only for old shows.
PROBLEMS WITH NEW PLAYON TV TV
The downside of the Roku is that it’s limited to Netflix and HuluPlus for most of the TV content that we’re interested in watching, neither of which source CBS shows. Except for an ongoing and very annoying intermittent sound dropout problem in HuluPlus (which I’ve been told is a Roku HLS bug), the Roku has served our occasional Internet TV viewing pretty well and earned a higher WAF score than any other method we’ve tried. The few buttons on the Roku remote were easily mapped into our HarmonyOne remote, the main controller of our media device collection. The closest we have come is a workable solution using the Roku, which provides the best combination of video quality and no-keyboard-or-mouse-required navigation. I’ve been kissing a lot of frogs in search for an easy-to-use method to consume Internet TV and haven’t yet found a perfect solution, or even a great one. But it remains to be seen how much hassle she will be willing to endure even for $100 or so a month. The deal I had to cut to incentivize my skeptical spouse was to pay her what we were paying DirecTV. Note that I’m not ahead of the game money-wise on this change. But someone at the DirecTV control panel seems to not have gotten the memo yet because our service is still on. SmallNetBuilder can’t stand life with Internet TV, I jumped at this option.
Rather than face another two year commitment if Ms. When I called DirecTV, though, I found out that you can suspend service for up to six months. We took the big step the other day and decided to cancel DirecTV.
0 kommentar(er)
