AppleTV running Apple Music connected to my Marantz AVR. No ads. No privacy concerns. I get lossless stereo where available and Atmos on selected tracks. It's great.

How do you use it without needing a TV or display to navigate the UI?

I have my TV on which doesn’t bother me but I understand why it’s not ideal for all setups. If I select a song on my iPhone and airplay it to my AppleTV, it does a handover.

If you want to stay within the Apple ecosystem without the TV part, you could use an AVR with airplay built-in. Or get an AirPort Express, which can join a wifi network and become an Airplay client, and connect it via optical (mini toslink) to an AVR. And control it all from a phone or Mac.

At the risk of turning this into "please describe your setup in increasing detail to me," do you use Spotify for anything? I have a Marantz AVR and honestly it's kind of buggy, but I'm trying to connect directly to it from Spotify (mostly because that's just where my listening history is). Perhaps it would do better connecting into an Apple TV and running spotify on there?

I use a Chromecast Ultra for this, works with Spotify, Tidal, Youtube apps. Or, if you don't care about 4K get a regular 3rd gen Chromecast. These are NOT the newest gen Chromecasts with Google TV, these are 'dumb' devices that just receive streams and don't run apps.

Unfortunately as of a few years ago Google TV/Android TV forces ads for useless content in the home screen, taking up bandwidth and slowing load times. The 'dumb' Chromecasts can still talk to the AVR over HDMI-CEC to turn on power, adjust volume, etc.

Not the parent but my home theater receiver is AirPlay compatible so I just select tracks using my phone as if it were a HomePod or Bluetooth speaker. We also have a VSSL for other rooms in the house. Same deal.

> you are being unnecessarily disingenuous

I'm not, honestly. Think of AVR-integrated radio receivers and hi-fi CD players: a typical appliance-grade (non-raster) VFD/LCD display is sufficient for navigating through radio stations and CD tracks; I will admit that Alexa-style voice-control can work quite well for online services like Spotify or Apple Music, but even then I find myself frequently needing to reach for my phone (and wait for Amazon's webview-based Echo app to load) for anything nontrivial.

While a good modern TV can show a picture from standby in a few seconds, it "feels wrong" to me to have to turn-on an eye-burningly-bright main living-room TV just to select a song to play.

It also introduces a lot of fragility into the ecosystem. If your TV fails (which does happen sometimes), you're suddenly without access to almost all features of the hardware? Unacceptable.

Unacceptable? How often does that happen (> 10 years?) without one having an old computer lcd from 2016 as backup in the cellar? Or a dirt cheap mini hdmi 7-inch replacement ordered overnight on Amazon?

Aside my guess is the Apple TV does usually work “headless” in OP use case with music playing controlled from his phone. One only needs a tv for streaming video (obviously) and I think for initial setup.

Exactly, people upgrade their telly years before they reach the end of their functional life

People are still buying and selling CRT tv’s for retro gaming so you are correct.

I’ve had many more VFDs and small LCDs displays fail than televisions, and much prefer the separation of functions.

I don't like Apple and its 'stuffs' but if it works anything like Spotify, then I can control 'it/Spotify' from my PC/Firefox while the music is played by my phone to an bluetooth JBL. So even without a dedicated TV/screen, I can listen to Spotify in other devices. I assume the comment would benefit from a setup like that - smartphone to control, AppleTV and the rest for the audio.

Apple for some reason hasn’t implemented that feature, and it boggles the mind. Say I’m playing music on my iPhone and I try playing a track on my mac, it doesn’t ask me on which device to play, hell, it doesn’t even stop playing on my iPhone to start on my mac, it just puts an ugly warning in the middle of the screen saying something like “stop playing on your iPhone to listen to the song on this device”.

It’s actually insane to me.

They have this feature, it is called Hand-off I think. It works between iPhones and HomePods. Additionally there’s “control other devices”, which allows controlling the music played on other devices. That is between most Apple device categories, although I’m unsure about Mac support for it.

The ability to control what's playing on other devices (e.g. HomePod / Apple TV) is also available from the Music app on Mac.

I have used AM since launch and don’t understand what you’re complaining about exactly. I have never, not once, seen a message telling me to stop playing on one device to play on another with AM. Spotify otoh is super strict with licensing and does that. Why wouldn’t you want to be able to play 2 different streams in 2 different places?

I have my AM on my Sonos, my phone, my ATV, and my dad’s Sonos and have never seen a message that it’s playing elsewhere. With Spotify my setup absolutely would be impossible using the same account.

I personally don’t want the Spotify style playback features; keep them out of my AM please.

Edit: I forgot you can also now share a queue via Apple Music using airplay, even if others at the party don’t have an account.

It's sort of sad how these tools went from "godlike new era of human civilization" to "some commodity tools for marketing teams to sell stuff".

I get that they are trying to find some practical used cases for their tools. But there's no enlightenment in the product development here.

If this is already the part of the s-curve where these AI tools get diminishing returns...what a waste of everybody's time.

People need to realise that all this AB testing is going to lead YouTube developers to one final version: An endless TikTok style scroll of (soon to be AI-generated) recommended videos.

No search. No desktop/friendly UX. It’s all going to go away.

You can see this happening already with the inability to permanently disable “shorts”. They can only be disabled for 30 days. You can see this happening when unrelated recommendations appear in search results. You can see this happening with the inability to block a channel, you can only stop it appearing in recommendations. It’s only going to keep getting worse.

Get off YouTube (and especially get your kids off the platform) and find alternatives. It’s not going to end well.

I concur. Aside from user hostility, these purely algorithmic feeds with no search, mid-video snap-cut ads, and blink-attention-span content is retarding reasoning skills and already having a negative gestalt effect on society.

For, perhaps only once in multiple generations, all the "old folks" raging against "the kids" with their new media are correct.

More and more, the movie "Idiocracy" is becoming a documentary.

Let’s not also forget that Apple and Google are currently illegally distributing the TikTok app in their platforms. Despite a law passed by Congress and upheld by the supreme court that this shouldn’t be happening. But I guess the president, with no legal basis, gets to just order an extension and pinky promise not to enforce it. This is the new crazy dynamic between the administration and tech companies.

https://www.theverge.com/23651507/tiktok-ban-us-news

We're going into some kind of crazy corruption. When tariffs change hourly, it becomes impossible for a business to adhere to the law. The only way around that is paying off the people doing the auditing or the people at the top. This isn't good.

> currently illegally distributing the TikTok app in their platforms

What's the text of the law about this? Was there a free speech lawsuit over it, or is state censorship of the app store fine now? Just asking because in another thread someone is complaining that EU doesn't have free speech compared to the US.

(edit: wow, we're already flagged off the front page, huh)

The Wikipedia page has a good summary of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Garland

I'm sure various scifi authors have covered this topic to death (pun intended). But something about eternal life just feels so empty to me.

And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.

If life feels empty to you, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better soon. I feel the opposite - there is so much to do, and so little time. I am also happy and content just... existing.

I don't think a social problem (that will be solved in time, and is already solved in some countries) is a reason to prevent this from happening.

Social problems can be fixed, death is final. If euthanasia doesn't become legal before, it certainly will be after.

I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense.

Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before.

“The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it.

What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.

Yes, I've read/watched most of those and I believe they are just entertainment. I can perfectly envision people living happy, long lives. These books and shows have manufactured conflict for drama.

With our current lifespan I already see lots of people intentionally killing themselves with alcohol or drugs or food. I cannot imagine most people would be happy with eternity.

I know most people aren't happy with how long they live now. The idea is that you'd get to choose how long you want to live instead of having it forced on you.

Yeah, ideally suicide would be 100% of deaths.

To be honest, I've never gotten that. The creative output I can manage in a mere 80ish years has never felt sufficient to me. I would love to have the lifespan to be able to take on tasks like selectively breeding Bunya pines, or painting gigapixel collages.

AppleTV 4K box with the new Enhance Dialogue feature has been working great for me.

Raising the center channel never sounded great to me, because there are so many other sounds in the center channel as well.

At least now I can raise only the dialogue levels on demand.

I have no doubt that Dialog Enhancer features, which are available on many streaming devices and AVRs, can work well. They are basically variants of multi-band dynamic compressors tuned to target vocal frequencies on the center channel.

Both my streaming device and AVR each have their own flavor of dialog enhancer and they do help improve the problem substantially. But I don't feel 'good' about just leaving this kind of post-processing feature on long-term and certainly not as a widely recommended best practice (except for hearing impaired users). I guess the reason for my reluctance is more in principle than practical. It's just not the right technical approach to solving the root problem, and any automatic algorithm, no matter how adaptive, dynamic or clever, will sometimes fail to do the right thing. It also bothers me that every implementation of dialog enhancer I've seen is opaque and undocumented.

I've been in and around video and audio engineering for most of my career, especially on the broadcast tooling side creating new gear. I go way back to the analog days when we could only dream of having such a pristine digital signal throughout the entire signal chain. We were always battling generation loss and noise on the production side and on the home theater side, we spent time and money slathering various noise reduction and other 'enhancement' processing to fix the worst aspects of the degraded analog signals we received.

At long last, today we live in that sci-fi future nirvana where the same levels the director approved on the mixing stage can be exactly what you hear at home. So, yeah, I have some PTSD about still needing to slap some post-process on at home to fix issues that should not be there in the first place. We waited decades for this tech to arrive, so the engineer in me wants it to work - without fixes or user patches. And that means addressing the issue at the source.

The recent signal leak shows that they really do believe this stuff. insert american flag and prayer emojis

The vice president writing they were going to pray makes me think the editor of the Atlantic was intentionally added to the chat.

I don’t see how it could be believable that Vance is actually religious and isn’t just using it as a way to get votes.

Well they have completely redefined what Christianity is, so in a way it doesn't surprise me that they need/use this redefined religion to provide "spiritual" comfort while performing these acts.

Yes the cynicism is there, but the "praying" is the means by which the subject performing the acts is able to feel authentic while performing them.

Also they're all performing for each other, too.

I find it very believable that he became legitimately convinced of whatever odd sect Peter Thiel created that justifies extreme wealth hording, because it brought him into Peter Thiel's orbit which has clearly served him well.

People are really, really good at believing things that benefit themselves.

For what purpose? And if it was just for that, why did they also share classified information?

The "balling out Europe" stuff again. Their goal is to ultimately normalise the idea that the EU is an enemy in advance of the Greenland invasion. The leaking of clarified information doesn't matter because A) US service personal are expendable and B) the involvement in Yemen is now only to keep up appearances of being allied to Saudi Arabia who will in the long term also get the same treatment as the EU because their fuel output competes with US/Russia.

Maybe publicity? The group in charge knows they can do no wrong, and I would bet their voters liked the rhetoric in the chat. Maybe they use controversy as a tool to keep people distracted (or even lead them to check out).

Agreed, absolutely everything done needs to be viewed through the lens of what will the ratings/viewership be. Everything makes more sense. Just think of the public spectacle, interviewing world leaders in the pulpit at the Whitehouse for example. It's a live TV show.

The question is what consequences will it have. I have only seen good outcomes for the administration from the chat debacle. It is worrying, this could have led to a VP resigning.

The irony here is that despite all these DRM efforts, piracy groups upload 4K HDR (or Dolby Vision) atmos mkv files within hours anyway.

Meanwhile watching these shows the legal way on unsupported DRM chain gives you 720p SDR with worse audio.

This irony already existed in the good old DVD age. If you bought one legally you had to sit through several unskippable videos, usually also one about piracy, before the movie starts. If you had pirated that same movie would play immediately, so the user experience was better.

Back in the day you could use AnyDVD to skip all the pre-movie cruft.

Also, most DVD players allowed you to hit stop-stop-play to skip directly to the movie.

assuming you were playing on a computer.

They don't even need to deal with screen recording which this DRM is trying to protect against either. Just find a device that supports the highest playback resolution and steal the data right off the bus.

The way the groups typically achieve rips from streaming services is by using compromised Widevine L1 capable devices, and straight up extracting out the keys. This ends up in a dance of getting new devices when they eventually get blacklisted.

They thought of that. HDCP is supposed to prevent this by encrypting the video signal all the way to the playback device.

Yeah, but the HDCP keys were cracked over 10 years ago, and there are plenty of Chinese-made devices that defeat it.

I believe these piracy groups arent hijacking the HDMI signal. They're cracking the Widevine DRM chain to grab the audio and video data from the stream and repackage it into an mkv file.

They were cracked several times, but HDCP has a revocation/rotation mechanism so it doesn't really change anything.

In 2010, an HDCP master key was leaked, allowing anyone to generate an infinite number of valid new HDCP devices. This has made HDCP useless for stopping piracy for the past 15 years. All it's done since then is add another point of failure between people's electronics and their displays.

According to wikipedia, they released a non-backwards compatible update in 2013, which presumably fixes this.

Wonder how many people lost the ability to play ~~their content~~ the content they were licensing when they released that update, and had to buy new hardware because it was no longer supported.

not even hours later in most cases. these anti-theft measures will block the random individual who wants to make a clip out of a movie but won't stop anyone actively pirating.

It's wild to me that these guys still try this hard with DRM given that obvious reality. Like, I get that streaming services aren't just shipping an MP4 file that you can right-click and hit Save As. But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?

>But the blacking out the video when I take a screenshot on a freaking iPhone... what is being prevented here? Someone is going to make a copy of a movie by taking 3,000,000 screenshots and stitching them all together?

Even if making 3M screenshots to extract the video isn't a viable ripping strategy, it's still less work to block all capture APIs than it is to figure out which methods you want to block, and make sure that implementation is airtight.

That's why I pirate everything. Originally I tried purchasing music files (iTunes) with the hope of it supporting musicians I liked. When it was a lesser, hindered experience, I switched back to pirating everything, still do, and always will.

Have you tried Infuse as the playback app on AppleTV?

It’s one of the few apps I’m happy to pay the subscription cost for. Well worth it for a well made AP.

Not trying to make this sound like an ad. It’s just a legit good app.

I use it too and also pay the subscription. Though I only connect to a local synology SMB share with it. Am I missing out by not running jellyfin and hooking up Infuse to that?

Infuse is generally really good, but I wish it had a way to expose slightly more power user features such as: viewing detailed file info (codecs, resolutions, audio-video bitrates, stream info for all streams), ways to create arbitrary dynamic playlists/folders based on conditions, and viewing current stream debug info (MB/s, cache fill, ram usage, disk usage etc). Any debug info would be helpful when some files seem to kinda work but then crash Infuse. For example some 4k/6k/8k ProRes content at around 800Mb/s. Network/NAS isn’t the issue as it’s hardwired 1Gb/s. So then I don’t even know if some specific variation of ProRes (or every) is just unsupported on the appleTV and it goes into software decoding, or whether the AppleTV is oom-ing, or what exactly is wrong.

"Law and order" has long been code words for using the power of the state to enforce hierarchies that benefits those shouting "law and order".