aTV Flash (Black) Grid View Support for Embedded Cover Art (.M4V)

Hi guys -

 

First off, you’re all doing a great job and I encourage you to continue to do so. I’ve even encouraged you to do so by way of my wallet by buying aTV Flash (Black) even though I’m not really using it. With that said, I thought I’d provide a little feedback regarding what it’ll take to get me over the hump to it being my primary interface on my aTVs.  It’s already been discussed a bit here, but I wanted to provide a little more background as well as a formal request for the feature in the correct forum.

Background:

  • Ripping/Encoding: DVD -> DVD Fab -> Handbrake (Apple - General Preset) -> MetaX -> a single .m4v h.264/mp4 file w/meta data + cover art
  • Storage/Library: NAS for files; One Windows computer 'On' full-time running iTunes with files added from a UNC share (e.g. \\nas) so that the library is on the computer but the files are still on the NAS
  • Playing: 3 x aTV2s on all of the TVs (they also each have an XBOX 360), 7 Windows Computers, 2x Ipod Touch, an Ipad2, an iPhone4, a few uPnp music players and DLNA TVs, Tivos, etc.

Feature Request:

Intro: The Movie Rental and Netflix interfaces on the aTV2 are awesome.  Nothing can touch this Netflix interface - (I just wish the CDNs didn’t sometimes go stale forcing a reboot - see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2616899?start=435&tstart=0) I just wish the ‘Computer’ interface that looks at my iTunes library had more of the same look/feel as the Movie Rental and Netflix interfaces.  That’s where ATV Flash Black comes in.

Grid View Embedded Cover Art Support: aTV Flash (Black)'s grid view support is a monumental step in the right direction but performance suffers when having to read in volumes of covert art, it often doesn’t match up with the files, and I suspect some of the memory errors I sometimes get are related to caching lots of cover art.  Separate image files are a pain especially when MetaX does such a great job of encoding covert art into the .m4v file.  I’d like to see an option for aTV Flash (Black) to use the Cover Art in the .m4v file for grid view display purposes rather than any sort of remote-lookup/fetching/caching.  This is already supported in iTunes as well as Windows Explorer (Win7 and some earlier).

Net, it means that I’ll start using ATV Flash Black for ATV2 movie playing straight from my NAS rather than the ‘Computer’ interface and it’ll allow me to shutdown my full-time ‘on’ computer.  It also means that the computers will using iTunes as the front-end viewer and can simple browse the NAS via Windows Explorer to find/play media.

Keep up the great work!

-SDBonez

Thanks for your feedback.

Support for reading embedded cover art (embedded metadata is already being used) is in the works and will be available soon. This (hopefully) will be ready by the time 1.0 is available.

wonderful news - can’t wait to test it!  And yes, the embedded metadata feature is working great for me.

+1  :)

Kids and grandparents have no patients for all the fetching!  They want it now!   :wink:

+1

 

Great looking view, much much much better than a list of names, this once working properly will make me buy another aTV2

 

cheers

Have to give a +1 for this one. Spent a lot of time making sure the embedded cover art (via iFlicks) was proper and such and was surprised when it wasn’t used. Need a tester? Would love to have this feature!