this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
1436 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
59378 readers
3139 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My experience with Apple is that it doesn't play nice with other ecosystems. Cludgy workarounds are usually possible but if you are doing that you may as well go for Linux.
Yep. Like I said, likely justifiable reasons to hate Apple. Despite now being thoroughly in their ecosystem, I still hate them for iMessage exclusivity and it being easier for me to confirm than convincing 20+ people across my family and my wife’s family to switch to WhatsApp or something. Fuck them for that.
But there are things they do well. Apple TV is one of them, in my experience.
What other ecosystems do you need your TV to interface with? It has a remote, or you can use your phone to control it. And it has all the major streaming apps you would want in a smart TV.
Plex, cable, ps4, Wii, switch, NAS drive, android phone, PC, DVD home theatre, pi-hole + all existing and future streaming services.
I meant specifically with the Apple TV, since that was the topic of conversation. In case you weren’t aware, the Apple TV is just a box. It’s not an actual screen. So the consoles, DVD, cable, etc are irrelevant as they would be plugged directly into the screen as well. You’d just change screen inputs to use those.
Apple TV has a fully functional Plex app. In fact, it’s pretty widely regarded as one of the most compatible Plex clients, and it’s able to DirectPlay all of the major codecs. It’s better than the apps that come built into the major smart TV brands like Roku, as many of those don’t support modern codecs like HEVC/H.265.
Pihole would happen on the DNS level. It’s not something that would require specific compatibility with the Apple TV. Unless you’re not running it on your whole network, and are manually assigning devices to it via custom DNS for each device? That would be odd, but maybe you don’t have control over your router. But even then, you can just change the network settings on your device to point its DNS at your pihole.
As far as android phones go, are you just looking for screen mirroring? Or looking to use it as a remote? Either way, you can do that; There are apps for remote control on the Google Play store.
Existing and future streaming services will likely be better supported on Apple TV than on something Iike a Samsung TV. Hell, my Samsung TV already doesn’t fully support Plex, because the app hasn’t been updated in literal years. Apple is actually pretty well known for legacy support. Hell, their fourth generation Apple TV from 2015 still has support. That’s almost a decade of support. Meanwhile, my Samsung TV is only ~5 years old, and already has apps that haven’t been updated in literal years.
Apple gets flak from the android users every time they phase out an old model of hardware, but in reality they have a better track record than most android manufacturers. It was always funny seeing the Android users memeing about Apple phasing out a 6 or 7 year old device, when their phone is half as old and is already unsupported. Google has improved with this in recent years, but only because Pixel users raised hell and started complaining to the FTC about getting dropped after only 3 years.
From your description it does sound like a high end TV USB stick, and it's not too expensive.
Now the only reservation I have is that I need to make an Apple ID to use it.