Hey, I just brought my Apple TV 2 back from the living dead. After a botched firmware update all it did was flashing the white LED fast (about 3 times a second).
I followed the official reset instructions using the Apple remote but that didn’t help at all. Then I came across a few posts that said that by hooking up Apple TV 2 to a Mac using just a micro USB cable, you could actually restore it in iTunes. Those posts explicitly said that you have to disconnect HDMI and power and just plug in the USB cable. Read more »

Do you own a Wake-on-LAN (WOL) capable NAS (network attached storage) unit? Is your computer a Mac? Want to save on your energy bill?

The consumer NAS units you can buy these days are actually small Linux computers with a software RAID and a bunch of S-ATA hard drives inside. Depending on the make and model, some NAS units consume a considerable amount of energy even in standby mode. For instance, my QNAP NAS still consumes around 25W after all disks spun down. However, once I shut my NAS down, it only consumes 1W in deep sleep mode. It just keeps its network adapter barely alive so it’s able to “hear” a Wake-on-LAN signal.

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Some smart folks over at macprime.ch found out that the Swiss iTunes store is being populated with movie titles for the first time. I fired up my Apple TV 2 to see if it sees the movies in the Swiss iTunes store as well but as of now, they don’t show up yet (see screenshot below). In iTunes, the non-HD rentals have a price tag of CHF 3.50 and HD-rentals will be streamed to you for CHF 4.50. TV shows don’t seem to be available at all. Read more »

A few days ago I received the re-vamped Apple TV 2 (or 2G) in the mail. The iOS version in the new Apple TV is listed as 4.0. I was very curious to try the new AirPlay feature that Steve Jobs announced in his keynote in early September. AirPlay enables the ability to stream any kind (well, obviously the format needs to be supported by iTunes) of audio and video from any iOS device to Apple TV 2. I have yet to find out why this feature could be useful but hey – at least it’s pretty cool, isn’t it? ;-)

To be able to stream content to Apple TV 2 you need to press that small antenna icon on the right to the volume slider and a dialog pops up to choose the target iOS device. I tried both, the iPad and iPhone 4, to stream a movie to Apple TV 2 but unfortunately, only the audio stream is being recognized by Apple TV 2. Read more »

Recently, I got my Apple TV back from repair. After setting up the wireless network connection and trying to connect it to the shared iTunes library on my Mac I was expecting it to show up in iTunes so I could enter the key to pair both devices. Apple TV usually shows up within seconds in iTunes. Not this time! Read more »