Still no iTunes Extra with Apple TV 2?

A work around could be to use Quicktime to record them off your Mac screen and then convert to M4v using Handbrake (free) then put in the iTunes library (drag and drop) and viola' you have them to stream.

It was reported that Apple's Steve Jobs said that iTunes Extras and iTunes LPs would be coming to the second generation Apple TV.

If extras via the first gen device is anything to go by, I think they should give it a miss.

@capaho I had a 1st Gen Apple TV. I had it set up as only a streaming device. iTunes extras played perfectly fine on it. I would have though Apple would have addressed this by now.

It's either by design or sloth that they've left this feature (and others) out, I agree that it's a case of incorporating/porting the relevant code to the new platform - the ATV2 hardware is more capable than ATV1 and should cope at least as well or better than ATV1 with iTunes Extras/LP.

Frankly the logical place for iTunes Extras/LP is the TV and this seems a bizarre omission - I think it may be they were never the success Apple anticipated and that they may not be given much investment in the future.

To be honest, if the extras are free I'll have them but I rarely watch DVD/BluRay extras and maybe that's the majority behaviour. Perhaps better if they were optional or on-demand downloads for qualifying movies - would save everyone's storage and/or bandwidth requirements.

AC

Winston Churchill wrote:

Some of the extras files get close to a Gb and unlike a movie where you generally start at the beginning and let it play through, extras use will likely require access to different parts of the extras file on demand. I can't see this working very well with a streaming only device.

Buffering and chapter navigation of streamed media across the LAN is considerably faster on AppleTV2 than ATV1, so I think it would work fine by streaming - the navigational menus and associated media files, just like on DVD will be quite small - not much difference in hardware demands selecting/playing a feature/featurette from these compared to say selecting content in a genre or other grouping of video files. Any featurette should be able to start as quickly as choosing an individual TV episode or individual movie by streaming from local storage, and the menu could just stay on screen until the featurette started.

The menu for Extras/LP is after all nothing that special, it is just a rich menu, and this is described by HTML/XML/javascript or similar markup/scripting and associated media files. Just requires the relevant code to render the menu and most of this should be available in the iOS WebKit implementations for Safari.

It just requires some enthusiasm on Apple's part to implement these features.

The features in iTunes used to list AppleTV1 too, but I've not seen any recently.