Pause or Standby?

It won't hurt the Apple TV to leave a song paused rather than putting it into standby, but since the screensaver, etc., will still run it'll eat more power and stay nice and hot (which I suppose might shorten it's lifespan a bit).

You don't, however, need to turn your TV back on and navigate through the menus to put the ATV into standby. Try this once or twice with the TV on so you can see how it works and I'm sure you'll be able to do it without looking at the menus:

1. While your music is playing (or from anywhere else, for that matter), hold down the Menu button on the ATV remote for about 3 - 5 seconds. That should bring up the main menu directly, rather than having to press "Menu" repeatedly to get back out step-by-step.

2. Once the main menu is displayed you don't have to navigate to the Standby option- just hold down the Play/Pause button on the remote for 5-10 seconds. You should see the screen go blank and the music stop as the ATV goes into Standby mode.

As you can see, that's fairly easy to do blind. I usually press Menu once to make sure it dismisses the screen saver if it's on, then hold Menu down for 5-10 seconds to make sure the menu is up, then just hold down Play/Pause until I hear whatever I was listening to stop playing.

Hope that helps. 🙂

To be honest, standby mode is far more active than you might believe, and does not consume significantly less energy. You could also disable the screensaver in the menu if that bothered you.

If standby powered down most hardware and used only a watt or two it might be more useful.

Yes, I've noticed that ATV always seems to pull more power that it seems it should, but every little bit helps. Even a small savings is worth the extra 10-15 seconds to put it in Standby if I'm not going to be using it for 10 or 12 hours. I really wish it did have a lower power mode, though. Might not mind the extra power and heat if I lived in a colder climate, but here in AZ we don't really need that extra little space heater. 🙂

deraven wrote:
Yes, I've noticed that ATV always seems to pull more power that it seems it should, but every little bit helps.
Even a small savings is worth the extra 10-15 seconds to put it in Standby if I'm not going to be using it for 10 or 12 hours. I really wish it did have a lower power mode, though.

I agree, even small energy savings mount up over time.

You may have seen this, but if not it explains why standby mode isn't more efficient:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2671

Might not mind the extra power and heat if I lived in a colder climate, but here in AZ we don't really need that extra little space heater. 🙂

We could do with a bit of your climate in UK at present!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7864315.stm

No, I hadn't seen that article before.

Wow, Standby on the ATV seems pretty pointless if all it does is display a blank screen and stop any audio. The only difference between that and Pause is indeed just the screensaver not being active, which is so little I'm not even sure why they included Standby. Huh.

I think it would have been far better to implement something like WoL for syncing when necessary and leave everything else besides the network turned off. I guess older A/V hardware might have an issue with the HDMI disconnecting from time to time, but it still seems like they should have been able to do more to cut power consumption. Maybe provide a Sleep option (that could be enabled from an advanced menu so as not to confuse anyone) as well as Standby. Oh well.

Has anyone tried putting their ATV on a wall timer and shutting it off completely during the hours when you don't use it? This would of course have to be disabled when you had an overnight download to complete, like an HD movie over DSL or something.

People say that components like the hard drive will last longer when powered up all the time, but I have powered down my desktop and laptop every night for years and I've never had a drive failure - they need to be replaced with a larger drive long before they fail anyway!

Just a thought.