Speaker 3
as I understand it, you still need like a cable subscription or something to feed a signal to um, to the box. Right. I mean, you don't just get channels by getting the app. You've got to have an incoming cable or something like that. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So an over the air aerial, so you can pick up over the air, um, channels, or you could of course, um, add a cable if you still have a cable subscription. So yeah, yeah, there are many different ways of being able to add channels. Kind of staying on the, I guess, old media side of things. Quanta. This is an app that there's a TVOS companion app, but basically it runs on iOS and it allows for a record player to be able to be input into iOS. There's a dongle and then have that record audio appear through AirPlay on your Apple TV and then also be displayed the artwork and also have the artwork displayed on the big screen. That's pretty amazing. Then for YouTube and I guess collections different media from different sources, Play by Marcos Tanaka. Again, this is a multi -platform app, but it allows you to set up different feeds and it also allows you to bring in content from Netflix, from the TV app, from YouTube, from pretty much everywhere and be that one place where as you're collecting different videos and different media from around the web, you can kind of just go back and play it from one spot, which is incredible. every time I boot it up, there's something new and very, very heavily actively developed and a real testament really to what you can do on Apple TV. But again, it's multi -platform. But I'd say the biggest thing, and this isn't something that is actually on Apple TV, but is something that has become essential for my Apple TV experience, and that is Home Assistant.
Speaker 1
you can run Home Assistant on Mac or like on a Raspberry Pi. And with a little bit of trickery and a little bit of work, you can do so much with the Apple TV. Because on the network, the Apple TV actually shows a play state, shows what app is being played on a given Apple TV. And based on that data, you can get your lights to automatically dim as you play back on the Apple TV. You could even set up masking for different aspect ratios if you're in a home theatre. You can even set up certain things like for example I can pin the stream of a particular film or TV show and if I'm watching that particular film or TV show my lights will change depending on the content I'm watching. And so there's so much that you can do of Home Assistant that unfortunately Apple haven't integrated with Apple Home and Apple TV themselves. And so I would look into that as well. And so they're probably my biggest tips. We
Speaker 3
actually talk about Home Assistant a lot over on the Automators podcast. And that's just like, that is what Home Assistant is so good at is bringing automation and controls to things that Apple hasn't bothered to. And it really is quite impressive, what you can do with that stuff. All right, well, Sigmund, I wanna thank you so much for coming on today. For people who wanna learn more, where should they go? Well,
Speaker 1
you can find my writing over at Mac Stories, where I've joined a fantastic team over there. Of course, we have a weekly Apple TV podcast called Magic Rays of Light, in which I talk all about Apple TV alongside my co -host Devon Dundee. And you can find me on social media pretty much everywhere at SIGJudge alongside MasterDawn, which I'm sure will have linked in the show notes. So yeah, I really, again, really appreciate you having me on the show. Um, this has been a bit of a dream. So thank you. Well,
Speaker 3
we appreciate it because, uh, you know, we want to keep up with Apple TV and you're the guy. Uh, thank you to our sponsors this week, one password and next week, we are the Mac power users. You can us over at relay .fm slash MPU and we'll see you next time.