I’ve started using a spare computer monitor as a TV in my bedroom so that I could hook it up to my laptop and stream programmes onto a bigger screen when I wanted to.
However, it’s irritating having to cable everything up, so I purchased an Apple TV to stream directly to it. So far my experience has been on the whole positive, with a few drawbacks.
Set up was reasonably easy, and now I have it up and running, on both my laptop and my iPad I am able to select AirPlay mirroring and begin mirroring my screen onto my TV; it also sends the sound.
That said, not everything works perfectly. Here is how it looks so far:
- Videos in iTunes mirror though there doesn’t seem to be a volume control I can activate from the iPad
- TVCatchUp mirrors but without any volume control
- BBC iPlayer mirrors from my iPad, and lets me control the volume with the iPad volume control
- 4od blocks mirroring from my iPad
- NFL GamePass mirrors from my iPad and lets me control the volume
- Sky Go blocks mirroring from my iPad
It is worth noting that even though Sky think they’re being clever by blocking AirPlay mirroring on the iPad, I can just open up the video stream in a browser on my desktop, full screen it and AirPlay mirror my entire laptop screen.
The built app apps for Apple TV are pretty useless though. They don’t have any apps for iPlayer, 4od, GamePass or Sky Go (and even if they did, I can only have two devices on Sky Go anyway), so I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much with my Apple TV than mirroring a different device to it.
It would certainly be nice if I could use it as a standalone box to watch things on, but until they open it up for third party apps, I can’t see me getting much use out of it that way.
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Tags: airplay, apple tv, streaming, tv
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2012 at 11:44 am and is filed under Reviews, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.