Air Media Center, a popular multi-platform mobile media center, has been recently updated with support for the new Apple TV. The app now lets you stream your media collection from your computer not only to your mobile device, but also to Apple TV 4.

Air Media Center doesn’t require any syncing or copying; it will automatically transcode your music, video and photo streams when necessary to match the playback capabilities of your device, so you don’t have to worry about codecs or file conversions.

Air Media Center is a suite of 2 applications: in order to enjoy AMC on your iPhone/iPad (Android and Windows Mobile versions will be available soon) or Apple TV, you will first need to download and install a free server application on your Mac or PC. Air Media Server is available for free in the Mac App Store. PC version is also available for free from the developer’s website.

To download the app on your Apple TV simply search for “Air Media Center” on the Apple TV App Store.

The app costs $4.99.

Features:
• Retina display optimized video and photo streaming
• Authenticate using your Mac or PC user accounts
• Hide files or folders using file system permissions
• Play videos, music, photos of any form or shape
• Provides instant live transcoding if needed
• Folder, iTunes playlist and iPhoto album sharing

Supported files/formats:
AVI, DIVX, XVID, MKV, MP4, M4V, MOV, MPG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, EyeTV MPEG2, MPEG-4, ASF, WMV, WMA, WAV, MP3, 3GP, OGG, FLAC, MPEG audio, ADTS AAC audio, Real Audio and Video, Macromedia Flash (Only embedded audio is decoded), FLV (Macromedia Flash video files), DVR-MS, WTV, CDR, ISO and more.

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MyPixPo is a new tvOS app that lets you view photos from Flickr and Facebook via Apple TV. The app gives access to a user’s entire photo archive, no matter how or where they were taken, thereby liberating their photo collection.

Users can see all the photos they have uploaded to Flickr or Facebook, as well as photos they are tagged in.

The app functions while Apple TV is playing music.

With the release of the original Apple TV, I and many others fell in love with the ability for it to liberate your archive of photos that you’d taken over the years. Unfortunately, with each new release of the hardware things got worse with that side of the product.” says developer Mark Johnson. “When the new Apple TV was announced I immediately wanted to bring a way of showing a truly random selection of photos from your entire archive.

MyPixPo is free to download but it will become a paid app with the next update, which will integrate access to Google Photos and Google Drive. According to the developers, the additional features will make it easier for photos to appear in the app from users with an Android device.

There is a companion app coming soon that will allow users to see the context of photos that have recently been shown on the TV.

Search for “MyPixPo” on your Apple TV to download the app.

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We first heard about AllCast more than a year back when it was shown off in beta on Android. Coming from the Cyanogen Mode developer Koushik Dutt, it promised the ability to mirror your phone to a variety of devices including Apple TV. Last month, it went out of beta on Android and a few days back, popped up on the App Store.

AllCast iOS app lets you stream photos, slideshows, videos and music to your television from your iPhone or iPad. But what makes it unique and different from the native AirPlay feature, is the wide range of devices and services that it supports.

The devices to which AllCast can push your media include Apple TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Roku, WDTV and Chrome. Besides, all DLNA receivers and smart televisions from Samsung, Sony and Panasonic are supported.

On the other end, your media can come from a variety of sources and services like your Camera Roll, Music app, Google Plus library, Instagram account, Dropbox album, Google Drive files and any media servers.

The AllCast app is avaialble for free on the App Store. However, this version is ad supported, has a limit on streamable video length and a splash screen, all of which can be removed with an in-app purchase of $4.99.

So, if you have a wide range of media devices in your living room or have your photos and videos spread across multiple cloud storage services, AllCast is for you.

Get AllCast from the App Store.

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Microsoft Xim, launched back in October, brings a very useful concept to life – sharing photos across devices, just for viewing. Instead of a dozen friends hurling around to see the party pics on my phone or mailing the vacation photos to all my family members, I could just stream it to all of their phones at once and view them together.

ALSO CHECK OUT: The Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide for Apple TV users

All connected users can pan, zoom and swipe together and add messages for a synchronised experience. It is available on iOS, Android and Windows, and fortunately, only one of the users in the group needs to have Microsoft Xim installed. The Xim photos expire after sometime, in case you’re wondering.

The app today received its biggest update yet, bringing support for streaming photos to various media devices and of course, Apple TV also gets a bite.

Now you can share the photos directly to the HDTV via Apple TV and enjoy with your family, even if it’s being shared to you by your brother miles away. Or you can slideshow the pictures shared with you by your client, for your colleagues over AirPlay on the over-the-head display.

Here is the complete changelog for the Microsoft Xim update 1.3:

• Now playing on the big screen! Display support for browser, Xbox One, Google Chromecast, AppleTV, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick
• Xim expiration set to one hour
• Bug fixes

Download Microsoft Xim for iOS for free.

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Though released along with iOS 8, the 7.0 update for Apple TV is essentially just catching up with what iOS 7 offered on iPhones and iPads. Apart from the flat design, the new iCloud Photo Sharing feature is a perfect exhibit.

Not sure if you guys have ever used it, but in the Share sheet in iOS 7 Photos app, there is an iCloud option which can be used to share photos, videos or albums with friends and family. Up until now, the other guy could see the shared media only on an iOS device or a Mac/PC.

With the 7.0 update, Apple TV has also picked up this feature.

Your photos and videos – As seen on TV
With iCloud Photo Sharing, invitations to view your photos and videos can be sent to friends and family who also have Apple TV, so they can share in the fun. And uploading the photos and videos from a summer vacation or any other event is as easy as doing nothing at all.

So if your parents don’t have any iDevice, but have an Apple TV 3 at home, you can send an invite to them. This notification can be opened to view your college photos or baby videos on the big screen.

Talking about videos, you will now be able to watch your iMovie projects on Apple TV without the need of syncing or sending them to iTunes. This is a really cool feature, especially if you’re making a casual or personal video. iCloud Photo Sharing combined with the new peer-to-peer AirPlay, will let you show off your creations anywhere, with just a tap.

Read more on the Apple TV 7.0 update.

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Amazon has been battling the Apple TV to find market for its own set top box, the Fire TV. However, that hasn’t kept Amazon from bringing its services to Apple TV users, as they just updated their Cloud Drive Photos app for iOS with AirPlay support.

Cloud Drive is pretty much what it sounds like – a cloud storage service by Amazon. The app lets you enjoy the stored pics and videos on your iPhone and iPad.

Cloud Drive Photos  features a great interface with a timeline view and provision for albums. It also has an auto-save option for iOS which automatically backs up your camera roll to the cloud.

Today’s update brings AirPlay mirroring to the app. And that means you’ll now be able to directly broadcast the pictures, videos or movies stored on Amazon Cloud Drive, to your television via Apple TV.

The update also brings a bunch of other features:

– Photo and video metadata: View date taken, resolution, image type, and file name
– Album rename: Change an album name by long pressing the album you want to change (iPhone only)
– Album cover swipe: Change your album cover photo by swiping left or right on the album (iPhone only)
– Manage cache: Customize your application cache settings

If you don’t have it already, you can get the Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app on the App Store for free and it comes with a complementary 5GB storage!

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WWDC 2014 is over, and noticeably absent from last week’s keynote and sessions was any mention of the Apple TV. For a billion dollar product, this silence from Apple means one of two things: it could mean the business isn’t important, or more likely, it could mean that there are big things coming that aren’t ready for public consumption. Taking the assumption for the moment that a mere billion dollars is important to Apple, let’s review the announcements made last week and see how they may apply to the Apple TV product line.

(Reading between the lines of Apple’s announcements is often very telling. For example, prior to the iPhone 5 announcement, at WWDC Apple announced “auto layout” for iOS apps. On its own, it was a well-received feature, but in light of different screen sizes of the rumored new iPhone models, that feature took on a whole new perspective.)

Announcements last week that show promise:

Metal

Possibly the most interesting announcement for future Apple TV potential is the announcement of Metal. Metal is a set of developer API’s that allow “bare metal” access to the full graphics capabilities of the underlying hardware.

The game demos that were shown were fairly incredible for an iPad, and showed the hardware that Apple ships is getting closer and closer to “console-level” graphics capabilities. Granted, the demo was shown on an iPad Air, which greatly out-performs the current Apple TV products, but the Apple TV is overdue for a hardware refresh.

With most consumer televisions supporting 1080 resolution, an Apple TV with equivalent hardware specs as the iPad Air would outperform the Air. Not until TV’s reach 4k resolution does a television surpass the Air’s resolution.

HomeKit

There was a fair amount of unsubstantiated rumor and buzz around HomeKit prior to the announcement, with some proclaiming that Apple would “own” the home automation market. Instead, what Apple did is much more powerful – they have created an underlying architecture and set of API’s that enable developers to standardize the interaction of their devices and integrate different vendors seamlessly.

The ability to control home alarms, thermostats, and lights is very powerful. Having the ability to leverage this information in your home from the largest screen you own would hopefully be an area of expansion as this technology is adopted, and combined with Siri would be an even more powerful offering.

Siri

There are a couple of interesting tidbits surrounding Siri. Obviously, expansions in supported languages and overall capabilities is always interesting, but also fairly expected. Song recognition would be a feature that could be interesting for home use, and the ability to purchase content via iTunes store lays even more groundwork.

But there is one feature that would be essential to have Siri become a core part of Apple TV. The announced “always on” feature is the one. “Hey Siri, let’s watch some football” would seem to be a very Apple-ish way of approaching the living room. It will be interesting to see if this feature moves to the TV.

Continuity and indoor location API’s

This announcement has the most “start into my crystal ball to see the future” around it. With Continuity, Apple is likely using Bluetooth LE (think iBeacon) capabilities in their devices to determine when you are typing an email on your iPad and walk up to your Mac, and transfer the document and state of one device to another.

Obviously this is a “cool” technology, but if you apply it to the Apple TV, the feature takes on a whole new perspective. Apple could expand this capability to allow you to transfer the viewing of a YouTube or iTunes video directly to the Apple TV rather than AirPlay it.

But even more interesting is the overall concept of location-awareness. If the Apple TV knew that your iPhone was in the room, when you launched the “Remote” app on your iPhone, it would pick the appropriate Apple TV rather than making you select.

AirPlay could default to the nearest device. Content on the TV could automatically be selected based on the current user. Age restrictions could be automatic based on the devices in range. Many, many possibilities.

Photos

Apple has “upgraded” their photos support from iOS devices, allowing photos to be hidden, storing all photos in the cloud, and streamlining the uploading and editing of cloud-based photos. As photos are already supported on the Apple TV using the current iCloud services, we can safely assume that the new capabilities will likely be supported as well.

Family Sharing that allows family members to share purchases from iTunes (music, movies, tv shows) and the App Store (games!), as well as a family calendar and photos looks very promising, too.

And let’s not forget that in iOS 8, AirPlay will use peer-to-peer to connect to the Apple TV, letting us share the content from the iOS device on the big screen much easier and faster.

Another WWDC, another year, and no Apple TV public API support. Yet Apple has continued to lay more and more groundwork so that if, and hopefully when, they do open up the Apple TV to developers, it will be with a set of mature and extensive capabilities.

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The jaw dropping loading screen drives you into a grid of featured photographs, each having its own story to tell. Select one and your iPad shows the article in a typical blogpost fashion, while the Apple TV puts forth the featured image in full screen. You can select other pictures, country stats or author bio and all are stunningly animated on the Apple TV. Interactive pictures and slide show modes are also present.

So far so good. But is this update as huge as some claim to be? Not really. First of all, though shown in full screen, these are not HD images which look great from 5m aways, but fades, blurs and pixelates as you look closer. Reuters wants you to subscribe to a monthly ($1.99) or quarterly ($5.99) plan for the HD edition. Anyway that’s understandable, ‘coz these are some breath-taking pictures we’re talking about here.

But the whole AirPlay setup in The Wider Image app seems a little funny to me. Once you take up the post, the same photo is AirPlayed till you end reading and exit, unless you select another one. Selecting other images, country statistics or author info, would bring it up both on the iPad and the Apple TV, which doesn’t make sense. What a normal reader wants (at least for me) is to show the featured image when he starts reading and as he scrolls down and comes across another photograph, that should automatically be mirrored even without selecting it. This would help him to comfortably read the content, look up to the television for a good look at the image and continue downwards.

It is odd that the world’s greatest news agency has left such a large room for improvement in the user experience department. Hopefully other reviews and user feedbacks have already brought it up to their notice and they’ll be bringing changes in the next update. So if you’re really into photojournalism and can put up with a little hiccupps, you can get The Wider Image app from the App Store for free.

Other new features in The Wider Image 3.0 update:

– Infinite stream of stories on the home screen
– Search stories, photographers and countries across the archive
– Browse 10 new themes. From ‘Cultural Atlas’ to ‘Living Planet’, there’s something for everyone.
– Enjoy striking images on your widescreen television, streamed wirelessly to Apple TV
– Even more image detail for retina displays with optional HD subscription
– Redesigned Explore screen shows stories on a world map
– Redesigned My View screen enables you to select photographers and countries to follow. All your favourites are now in one place.

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Editing photos on your iPad, iPhone, iPod, and yes, even your Apple TV! It is no secret that we all love to take photos with our mobile devices leaving the only question to be: “How can I edit, and share, my pictures?” Well, Air Show HD hopes to be an answer to this question. And a few others. It is true that Apple has offered the ability to share and edit your photos since the release of iOS 5. That said, there is one thing that Apple has never addressed and that is in regard to the photos you may not want to share publically.

As of today, if you decide to set up a slideshow with your iOS device, on your Apple TV, you have little-to-no control over what photos you will be showing. The only power you are given is the ability to select what folder you will be viewing within the default photo gallery. Well, if you are anything like me, you may not want to show every photo within that location to others.

This is where Air Show steps in.

Air Show HD by Splitmo – Straight From The Source

• Show off your best pictures on your big screen TV using Air Show and an Apple TV. Zoom in, crop and caption your best pictures while Air Show automatically builds a slide show for you.
• Air Show allows you to search through your photos, adding them directly to the TV or the generated slide show. Air Show shows only the photos YOU want without your friends seeing potentially embarrassing pictures by accident.
• If you want to save more than 3 slide shows, Air Show provides unlimited slide shows as a one time in-app purchase.
• Full Retina support for the iPhone 4, 4s, 5 and the new iPad.

The GOOD:

1)  This application works AS ADEVERTISED. With every press of a button you are given clear directions on what you need to do, and how you need to do it. This enables all users, at every skill level, to be able to use this application. Air Show keeps it simple.

2)  The UI of Air Show makes navigation quite easy. The ability to drag and drop photos gives the feel of a more advanced program, like Photoshop, running on your iOS device. Though the functionality could be considered “advanced” the use of these features does not leave you feeling as if the app were overly complicated.

3)  The AirPlay function is insanely responsive. Though most of the credit for this feature may go to Apple, iOS, and the software development behind the two, Air Show HD has done a great job taking advantage of these features. You are given the ability to zoom in, and out, while the slideshow is streaming to the Apple TV. This is a feature that the default iOS gallery does not have functioning fully.

The BAD:

1)  At first glance, this application feels lacking. When I first launched it and started using it to stream slideshows, I felt it was missing some basic functions that iOS does very well by default, such as multiple transition animations. That said, the longer I played with Air Show, on my iPad 2, the more I began to see it for the benefits it offers. Not to mention, updates are prevalent in all apps. Surely there will be more to come from this app.

The UGLY TRUTH.

In the end, Air Show HD stands on its own against the latest features, and options, of the default iOS gallery and its’ ability to stream slideshows to your Apple TV. As of today it is missing quite a few features that I would want to see in order for this application to become a full time app that I would use on a regular basis. Again, that said, there are two things that make Air Show stand out as an application worth downloading to your device today:

• The Price Is Right!

Air Show is absolutely free, right now! The fact is that we all love finding free apps and taking them for a test-drive. So, I would encourage you to head over to iTunes and give Air Show a shot.

• Privacy Control

The simple fact that I can select photos from different locations and easily create a customized slide show, is a powerful feature in-and-of itself. If you have “private” photos mixed in with your collection,  this app is absolutely  worth trying. I was able to create a slide show of select wedding pictures, vacation shots, and some graphic art I had made, all the while forgoing some “more embarrassing” shots.

Grab a copy today.

Also read:

Air Show updated with music playlists and color captions support

The post Air Show HD – Review appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

1. Enable SSH on your Apple TV

here is how to do it: Enable SSH & AFP on your Apple TV

2. Execute the following command:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@<APPLETV_IP>:/mnt/Media/<media_to_recover>/ /<Destination_local_machine>

example:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@192.168.27.150:/mnt/Media/Photos/ /tmp/

In this case all the photos stored in Apple TV will be copied to the local directory /tmp/

That’s all. Yes, it’s that simple.

In case you want to recover all the data without specifying any subdirectory use the following command:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@192.168.27.150:/mnt/Media/ /myAppleTVfullbackup/

NOTE:

• It will work on Mac, Linux as well as on Windows with openSSH
• To enable SSH you have to have your Apple TV already hacked
• The structure of directories and file names on Apple TV is the same like the one used in iPods

Enjoy and good luck!

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