by Perhaps you got an Apple TV for xmas or you’ve had one for a while but never got around to searching out those shortcuts for usage that Apple never tells you about. Thanks to this reddit feed, here’s over 50 must know tricks to make like with the Apple TV even better.
Apple TV Remote Tricks.
If you have an iOS device, particularly an iPad, download and setup the Apple Remote App. It’s much easier to type on your iOS device than using the remote to move letter to letter. Or pair a Bluetooth keyboard. It will save your sanity.
Holding down the menu button will get you back to the main menu faster than clicking menu 100 times. Holding up during playback shows info about the video. Holding select while the info bar is up gives you audio options (closed captioning).
You can put the Apple TV to sleep immediately by holding play/pause on the main menu. This combines well with the trick of holding menu to return to the main menu.
If you go into Settings > General > Remotes
Then click learning remote you can set map any remote control to use with your Apple TV. It’s actually quite incredible as the you can set up the mapping yourself.
While watching a movie/tv show press and hold the down button, this brings up a seek bar that allows you to skip ahead much faster than just normal fast forwarding.
Netflix On Apple TV
in Netflix, press “play” on the episode in the summary episode-list page to play it directly. Most people press “select” to go into the episode detail page and play it from there. This saves you the trouble of having to back out to that page after each episode.
You can also just press play on a series to play the next episode. Just press play when an episode ends to start the next. Next best thing to auto playing the next episode like some new netflix clients do.
If you go to the settings, you can hide apps from the main screen, which is nice if you know you’re never going to touch a lot of things on it. Tidies it up nicely.
Did you know you can watch the US version of Netflix / iTunes in the UK (and vice versa). Just check our VPN guides on how to do so. The USA netflix is 100% better than it’s uk offering.
General Hints
If you wish to organize your home screen more, you can select an icon and hold down on the center button until the icons start jiggling and move it wherever you want. Similar to iOS, but you can only move one at a time.
Mavericks has Airplay desktop extension (or whatever they call it), previous OSes had mirroring. With Mavericks you can make an AppleTV display count as a second monitor instead of just mirroring your first.
If you have HBO through your cable provider (i.e. Comcast), then setup HBO Go on your Apple TV. They have handful of movies to chose from, and having access to the shows (Game of Thrones, etc.) is so worth it.
If you have Hulu Plus and/or Netflix, add your account info into it. Same as before, it’ll greatly improve your enjoyment of the box.
Configure your display settings to ensure you’re getting the best resolution for your TV size. I noticed that when I first set mine up on our 52″, it wasn’t even pushing HD quality by default.
iFlicks is worth every penny. You’ll want to format your movie collection so they’re optimized for streaming to your Apple TV, especially if you’re working across wifi on both systems. iFlicks will automatically format the video and gather the metadata for the video too.