Different Top Shelf options for Media Player + Visibility / Order of icons

Legacy 2nd gen Apple TV
1

Currently when you have “Media” selected, the AppleTV topshelf shows your “Recently Played” videos and when selected, will auto-play the video.

I think it would great if there was two levels of options for how the topshelf operates with Media Player.

First would be what it actually shows in the topshelf. Instead of just a History, it would great if you could have an option to show random shows from your metadata cached library. Or an option to consolidate a full show into one poster, instead of a series of 10+ same episode posters when you watch a TV show back to back.

Second preference would be to have a setting for what happens when you click on the poster. Maybe something like … 

  1. Resume movie / resume episode / start next episode

  2. Show movie info / show tv show info

Ofcourse, with the 5.0 firmware, the Media icon is on the second line where the topshelf is not visible when selected. So ideally, an option to enable/disable the visibility of icons and to reorder them would be great. For now, I’ll settle with adding “.bak” to the appliance files to bump the Media icon to the top.

Thanks!

2

I wanted to do the same thing, and I found a work around. In the Parental Control settings page you can hide and show the default buttons. Hide the Itunes Movie Rental (Bottom of LIst in Parental Control) and the Media Button will move to top shelf.  But If I remove another button, NetFlix does not move to the top shelf. 

3

There are actually a few options in the current version.

You can toggle between Recently Played and Recently Added items in the top shelf by adjusting the setting found in Media > Settings > General.

Also, when selecting an item with the center (select) button the video info will be displayed. However, if you press the play/pause button when one of the top shelf items is highlighted it will skip the info screen and just play the video.

I’ll pass along your other ideas and see what we can do.