Apple TV: What you can't do

The Nintendo Wii seems to have more functionality, it streams from Itunes, has better photo management and accesses the internet. I don't like that you can not pick individual photos. I am still wondering if its worth keeping.

#19: The only thing I can think of is creating a playlist (or a Smart Playlist) that you sync to the Apple TV of just music videos; that should allow you to play them back to back and possibly shuffle them, though I admittedly haven't created a video playlist yet so I don't know if you get the shuffle feature in those.

Does anyone know if it is possible to shuffle the music videos? So you can just have them going in the background?

Thanks

Anyone figure out how to connect a 30" apple display to apple TV?

Does anyone know of a way to have the Apple TV shuffle music videos from a playlist? I have quite a few downloaded from the Music Store and have yet to figure out how to play more than one at a time, whether I stream directly from iTunes or sync to the Apple TV.

I wish you could categorize your movies and choose a category and see all the movies in that category on the Apple TV. You can enter a category for the movie in iTunes but it is not used in Apple TV.

Here here regarding on-the-go! A few other things I've wished for:

Sort fields like Sort Artist and Sort Album are not supported in Apple TV. They work great in iTunes, but neither works in Apple TV, and only Sort Artist appears to work on my 80gb iPod Video.

Switching between syncing and streaming requires you to reload your iTunes Library each time, which can take a while if your library is large. I wish they'd cache it on the Apple TV, and have a choice for REloading, since it doesn't change too often. This makes it a bit of a pain to switch from photos to music.

Lastly, in the streaming scenario, it's unfortunate that album art does not come down locally. It appears that unless you sync music, you won't get anything for the album art screen saver.

That said, I think it's a great version 1 offering.

Justin,

You could try going on your Mac to System Prefs->Energy Saver->Options and checking the box next to "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access". I'm not promising it'll work, but it could be worth a shot.

The Apple TV ought to be the ideal vehicle for displaying the digital photos you have on your Mac via your HDTV. Only the Apple TV seems ridiculously short on photo features.
- First up, you can only display photos from one source. We have a MacBook on which my girlfriend, a keen photographer, does most of her work and stores her photos. Upstairs we have a PC (apologies) which due to its larger HDD stores our music, video and archived photos. So why can't I set the PC as the device to sync all content from, but aditionally choose to stream photos from the MacBook? It's not as if I'm infringing copyright!
- Second up, once you get your photos on the machine, you're pretty limited in what you can do with them. As pointed out by MasterLeep, you can't browse or skip through photos, only play them as a slideshow. I'm not asking for PhotoShop, just a couple of basic slideshow functions.

Given the video/audio sophistication of the AppleTV, you'd have thought a few more options for displaying static images would have been pretty easy to build in, but obviously not.

I'm disappointed because browsing photos on our 37-inch TV would have been a nice way for me to justify buying the thing to my girlfriend! :)

I just wish it could wake up a computer it uses for syncing. I have no idea whether this is technically possible or even makes sense. However it would be nice to come home from work turn on the apple TV and be able to stream some stuff from my iMac. Instead I have to run upstairs and wake my computer first. Yeah I know I could just set it not to sleep or just not be lazy, but this feature would still be nice. Especially since syncing isn't a good option for me with that small hard drive. I also can't wait until the "use an external drive with the USB port" hack comes along, or is officially supported. It would also be nice if it could output 5.1 AAC encoded files over the optical cord that a receiver with Dolby Digital support could read as Dolby Digital (probably not even technically possible), as opposed to sending the receiver something similar to a Dolby Pro Logic soundtrack. Yeah, I have a lot of requests.