Apple TV 4 - Home Sharing Slideshows - Scratching my head...

FWIW my company gave an ATV4 to every employee (3300) (we work in fleet safety) So last week I decided to take a poll and although it's a limited group I thought it was interesting...

we gave 3300 out and I got 2469 responses and I asked how people used it and what they liked/disliked Here are a few of the highlights

94% used it only for Netflix/Hulu/iTunes movies and tv shows.

12% who like you, we're very upset with the loss of photo functionality (and other features) and went back to the ATV3.

90% found the games enjoyable/easy but only 25% actually played more than 10 times

45% gave Siri a "positive" response

14% have not been able to get home sharing working fully

98% reported frustration with the remote app incompatibility

The good news is that as a consumer we have choices and with those choices we can compare the pros and cons to determine how/when to upgrade or if it's even worth it. But at the end of the day, Apple wants to satisfy the majority of users (let alone shareholders) and it appears like that's what they did since most only use it for movies/tvshows only with some obvious issues to iron out with media format, Siri integration and the remote app...

anyway way I just thought it was interesting anecdote in dealing with our individual frustrations...

samaki wrote:

Agreed. Not cool. Weird also because Apply keeps advertising the photo features of ATV 4 on their website. No word that home sharing would no longer be supported...

Samaki you've hit on a point that drives me nuts about Apple.
Every new release whether it be the OS or app updates comes out with all the information about the amazing things they've added but nowhere do they include information about features they have removed.
They really should release tech bulletins detailing omitted features etc so that consumers can make a fair choice about upgrading because what their people may see as a little-used feature may well be mission critical to people.

Hi RexRox,

I guess the silver lining in all of this that Apple despite its claims and recent successes in many areas can't get a firm grasp on software quality. I also have a brand-new iMac Retina at home (that replaced a 5-year old machine), there the screen would come on every time the machine does its background network pings when in standby mode. I had to compare this with my other household machinery (that truly simply works) and came to the conclusion that there is still a vast rift between self-proclaimed progress and reality.

I.e., this should be good news for start-ups that can manage to focus on quality both in software and hardware. Like getting really basic things to work well - like putting a computer to sleep reliably... (and perhaps pay more than € 5,- per hour for their outsourced employees along the way... or actually do pay taxes!)

Hi Mandrieu,

I share your frustrations... I had high hopes that Apple would fix this jarring bug before christmas... may they were too busy working on iCar, iWhatever...

Apparently tvOS 9.2 beta is out... has any of you had the chance to check it out (to see whether our beloved bug has been addressed)?

MY main gripe is photostream ? iPhotos app should work with I cloud the same way as I phone iPad and Mac does, I took out extra I cloud storage to store all my photos and expected the photos app would be upgraded from the Apple TV 3 , I had to spend a lot of time sharing all my photos to myself so I can view them on a slide show , pretty crazy since there in the cloud anyway

Are you aware that the screensaver isn't intended to play more than a few dozen slides.

Agreed, pathetic. I just had a chat with Apple Care. "The issue is known." Will this post survive Apple censorship?

That's not correct, it's not a known issue, the screensaver is intended to play no more than a few dozen photos, that bit is working as intended, other areas of photo display do not appear to be working as intended.

Yes, Apple, how about it. Simply play photos, one after the other, from a fileshare. You know, a slideshow.

You could add music, and nice dissolves between each one later.

Just give us the bog-standard ability to play one photo after another.

Seriously, if I had known this, it would have been a deal-breaker for ATV4.

The slideshow bug is still present for me in tvOS 9.2.

Plays about 30-40 photos and they cycles back to some random ones from earlier and then either stops playing entirely or gets random.

I even created a new library, with a set of obviously sequential letters and numbers (62) to demonstrate it. Have reported it with bugreport, along with a link to the video so that they can see what is happening.

Talked to Apple support in Sweden and now they at least admitted it was a known problem. They also expressed surprise that it wasn´t fixed in 9.2

Not sure if this make me feel better about it though.

How can folders, keyboards and similar be more important than fixing an obvious error?