AppleTV

Plex On AppleTV

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I have had an AppleTV since the first generation one came out years ago. When the second-generation one came out I pick that up and sold the original on eBay. I have loved the idea of an AppleTV for years. I have even made my own homegrown media center on several occasions. If you read this blog you’ll read about several of those iterations. The problem is in practice I really haven’t had huge luck with the AppleTVs. The second-generation AppleTV I currently have has been replaced with a Mac Mini running Plex media center. That has been my media center of choice for a while. I have tried the Boxer box, and the Roku. with both of those I was hoping to plug into my media centers the a library, and with the Roku to use it as a front end for Plex. neither of those options worked out very well. All along the AppleTV has been powered on but not plugged into my TV. I would plug it in to music, but not really using it for TV. I have been generally lazy and didn’t want to jailbreak it. The Mac Mini has functioned generally well so I was in no rush to try anything different again. since my move I have had some more buggy experiences with the Mac Mini then the previous two years or so I’ve had it. It wasn’t enough for me to go making drastic changes, that is until I read that the Plex team had made a front end for the jailbroken AppleTV. So I gave jailbreaking a shot. At first I thought I had bricked the AppleTV, but after about two days of leaving it plugged in and I forgot about it. I turned on my TV and it had worked. I got really lucky.

After the small drama in jailbreaking, it was trivial to get Plex installed. After it was installed I ran into some problems with choppiness of the video. I fixed that by tweaking some of the bit rate settings. Since then it has been working perfectly. I got even luckier when less than a week after I had configured Plex Apple announced that Hulu is now available on the device. I covered that in another blog post.

For right now the AppleTV is now my main media center. I still have my Mac Mini. It’s needed to run the Plex server, and host all the videos and music on my Drobo. it is just not plugged into my TV anymore. It has been an pre-smooth experience so far. MC likes it that she can stream music again directly to the AppleTV without me having to plug it in or read it up since it is now always attached to the television.

We still have a TiVo, and use it for a DVR. Longer-term I would love to find a way to use Hulu, the Internet, and my AppleTV to replace TiVo and and really expensive cable bill. We are not quite there yet in trying that out.

Day & Evening With Different Parents

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Last night we got a call from MC’s parents asking if we were free for lunch today. They were visiting two of MC’s nephews and on the way back wanted to see us and check out the finished babies room. We had no plans so we looked forward to the visit.

They arrived around 11 and got to see all the work we have done on the apt. We then showed them the finished Wedding Album and then we walked to a greek place on Austin St for brunch. We had a good meal and then we all came back to the apt and went over the wedding photos in more details so we could put together an album for them.

In the evening my parents came over to drop off an air mattress we need for when guests visit. The one we have wasn’t so great. After that they took us out for dinner at a pizza place they like. After dinner we went to Italian ices and then headed back to our apartment. Since we worked on the photo album for my parents we realized we could add more photos to the album than we originally anticipated. we went through the list of photos again and had them add other shots they really wanted.

To show both sets of parents the photos, I used my MacBook air to send my screen to my Apple TV so they were able to sit on the couch and watch the photo stream while I made edits at their request. It was pretty cool. I just had iPhoto in full-screen mode and it was pretty seamless.

MC and I will work on the layout for both albums for our parents in the next week or so.

Hulu Plus Take 2

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Last September, I tried Hulu plus for about two months. I ended up canceling it because I didn’t use it that much to justify the $7.95 a month charge. My original thoughts were to use it on my iPad and possibly my TiVo. It didn’t really happen.

Flash forward to last week and I signed up for a weeks free trial of Hulu plus again. What’s changed is it is now available on the AppleTV. Last month even having Hulu plus available on the AppleTV wouldn’t really matter to me, but recently I have jailbroken the operating system on my Apple TV so I could install Plex media center. With Plex on my AppleTV I am using that as my main Media Center endpoint on my TV instead of using a Mac Mini plugged directly into the TV. So far it’s actually been working out really well. Adding Hulu plus for streaming of TV shows in addition to the downloaded content I have on Plex both available via the AppleTV has been working out pretty well. It’s also less buggy than using the Plex UI on my Mac Mini directly plugged into my television.

For now I just started paying for the first month of service. Will I keep it forever? Who knows, but were enjoying it while we have it.