Is it worth buying apple tv just for airplay? If you have apple tv, what is your experience? Apple tv thread, i guess

Is it worth buying apple tv just for airplay? If you have apple tv, what is your experience? Apple tv thread, i guess.

I have the 4K apple TV works well. But if you are after just airplay and not all the other apps. get a raspberry pi and set it up for airplay using kodi.

What does an Apple TV do?

What are the apps for it? Does it have a web browser? Can i watch animu from an external hdd?

>being such a brainlet you can't get your media for free

How often do you need airplay? I almost never use it, I think the only time I ever have was to watch something on amazon prime. If you require it, but don't want to spend that much on it, do like says. If you need it to control your homekit botnet home, and you use IOS, it's worth it for that. Otherwise, it's a fancy roku.

yes, its like turning your tv into a computer

> Is it worth buying apple tv just for airplay?
No. It's the shitty variant of a Windows/Android HTPC that can do DLNA, network shares and of course also DLNA / miracast / chromecast.

Could even do airplay on many, but why bother, it's as bad as just about everything Apple.

If you drink soylent, sure

I am not going to subscribe to any streaming services. Most of them probably don’t even work in my country. Can it be used for streaming videos in a browser or to play stuff from hdd? Or is it better to build a cheap pc and put some linux distro on it. I want one just for convenience, so i don’t have to connect my macbook to tv all the time i want to watch something

Also i have practically no free time, so i want it to just work. I don’t want to spend time setting it up and debugging

It works as well for streaming as probably any other thing, but it costs more. There are no physical ports to connect a hard drive, and if you mean streaming from a hard drive using another service, there also many cheaper options. You really should only bother if you require homekit or air play.

Would it be worth it to get the 4K model? I have a 4K TV and it currently has the cheapest 4K rentals.

Would those renting those at a cheaper rate justify the price of the thing versus the price of other options?

> Or is it better to build a cheap pc and put some linux distro on it.
Order one. It's like $150 to get a Celeron J3455 or Atom N3450 HTPC with Windows 10, and there are boxes half as expensive on Windows and 1/3 as expensive on Android.

You can also buy certain models with Ubuntu, yea.

The alternative is buying 4K blu-rays which would look better, but they cost $35 here and the cheapest player is an Xbox One S which is $350

Apple TV 4K is $200.
Another advantage is I have a few digital movies on iTunes already from physical blu rays and they'll be upgraded to 4K

Not him, but I bought an android TV box with a shitload of addons for free content. How can people actually enjoy this shit? Everything takes so long. Updating the available episodes/sources alone takes forever. Everything is basically single-process, so you can't have multiple things open.

I literally only use my TV box as an ambient sound maker for when Im going to sleep. Fuck that garbage.

>Everything is basically single-process, so you can't have multiple things open.
Wat. Android isn't single process by any means.

And the majority of devices now are featuring between 4-8 pretty powerful CPU cores.

Arguably, if you bought some $20 el cheapo box, maybe you should adjust your expectations accordingly...

Then you know your answer, I'm just surprised that your only 4k options are physical, xbox one, and apple tv...

You can't have multiple processes of Kodi open

Kodi is the main selling point of android boxes. The base android experience is garbage. The browsers are shit, the apps are limited as fuck. I'm considering just making it into a dedicated torrent box, because free content is absolute garbage to get, compared to a PC. It takes less than 10 seconds to find something on a PC, while browsing through the menus, updating the lists and refreshing shit takes forever.

The box is octa core with 2 gigs of ram. Should be more than enough for what it needs to do.

got one for my old non-smart LCD TV,
I mainly use it for youtube though.

>You can't have multiple processes of Kodi open
You could, but I think you need to use an APK patcher on most ROMs.

> The base android experience is garbage.
There is like a million good apps. You can run mpv and a file manager. Or whatever you like.

> It takes less than 10 seconds to find something on a PC, while browsing through the menus, updating the lists and refreshing shit takes forever.
Again, not a general problem.

> The box is octa core with 2 gigs of ram. Should be more than enough for what it needs to do.
Obviously the thing you're trying to do (networked access? storage access? IDK) is bottlenecked somehow. [First wild guess is that you're doing networking over WLAN and it's just shit at that.]

Indeed one possible answer to this is to not diagnose it and just throw a full decent PC at the problem, it has a chance of resolving the issue.

Op here. I don’t want to care about roms and shit. I had enough of it when i was still using android. I want everything to just work. I’m not paying for any content, i just want to share my laptop/ipad screen, and watch youtube and other videos from the internet.

> I don’t want to care about roms and shit.
Then care about IOS versions if you prefer. Or Windows versions. Or Linux versions.

I have a gen3 appletv that I got for free that I mostly have just used as a youtube player since there's only a set number of apps in the thing and a vast majority I don't really care about.

I guess if you have an iPhone, but chromecast and android TV devices allow a lot more utility.