It doesn't, and it never has. Does yours? Are you SURE?
Maury
I don't think my hard drive spins down on either of the two AppleTV units I own, even when in standby mode (they sure don't cool down any), so I don't even bother to put them in that mode, but they are VERY quiet and I usually cannot hear either one unless the room is deathly quiet or I'm standing within 2-3 feet of the unit (again in a quiet room). If yours is noisy, you must have gotten a flaky hard drive unit.
My additions:
Weather, just like the dashboard one. I hate having to flip around for the weather channel and then wait.
Real visualizers, as opposed to just the pictures. Everyone wants this, it seems.
Better power/output control. I should be able to turn off all screen output when playing an audio-only stream. My TV will go to sleep in these situations, which is good.
Internet radio support. You can actually fake this to get it to work, so why not just make it work?
AirDisk support. Then I could chuck both my DVD player AND the one remote.
Accept CEC power-down messages. So when I put my TV to sleep it will tell the ATV to go to sleep too.
Maury
Yeah, a weather app that shows up in the corner of the menu systems would be nice. But why not also offer a web browser like the hacked versions of AppleTV support? With "Remote" and an iPhone/Touch, it's quite a useful web browsing system and would look great on my 93" screen. Clearly, the unit has no trouble handling web browsing so I have no idea why they're hesitant to add it. The same is true with the visualizer thing. Even if it can't handle the snazziest, latest, greatest visualizers, certainly it could at least do the original and some others to boot.
As for radio support, I'm not sure what you mean by 'fool' it seeing as they even offer a radio 'icon' to display when listening to radio channels and correctly say "continuous" for duration of play. The only thing missing is an interface to select channels directly on the ATV. But you really don't need that so long as you have it connected to an iTunes computer. Just select all the radio stations you'd ever want to listen to and put them in a playlist or two. I have a Rock Radio Playlist and a Talk Radio playlist I set up in iTunes. They appear on AppleTV and all the channels work just fine.
I can also operate them from Signal (beats "Remote" in this case because Signal will find artwork for songs playing on the radio and show the name for the song playing, something that neither AppleTV or "Remote" for iPhone/Touch will do. I'm still waiting for a native Signal APP for the iphone as it's superior in most ways to the Remote App save the scrolling selection lists (i.e. you can easily build playlists on the fly with it as well).
The Pricing Structure of Apple needs a Big Rethink $1.99 is too much for a 3 min Music video, maybe .99 but no more. TV Shows are 1.99 whether they are 19 min or an Hour, and SD is $2.99. I think SD should drop to .99 and HD $1.99
My biggest problem is not the pricing (many videos are $1.49 and some appear for $.99 once in awhile) but rather the video QUALITY. Some are near DVD quality while others resemble poor VHS tape quality. There's no real consistency. I would like some of the Huey Lewis Videos, but they are such bad quality (especially the "If This Is It" video, which is abysmal and that's the one I liked best because of the hot redhead in it), I can't make myself purchase them. At this point, they should start offering HD music videos for that matter. They should also have a music video REQUEST page, in my opinion as there's no way to know if/when they'll ever add missing music videos. As I mentioned earlier, many videos are missing from artists they DO have some (often many) music videos for and these are sometimes famous music videos like Addicted To Love by Robert Palmer.
I have Tori Amos' Fade To Red video collection, which I hand-braked transferred to AppleTV at near DVD quality. The problem is several of the songs have remixed soundtracks on them and they just don't work as well as the original (notably "Crucify" was MUCH better in the original version with the guitar added and syncs properly whereas the version they use in this one is from the Tales of the Librarian remixes and sounds more like the Little Earthquakes version with the big drum but little to no guitar. The original video used the Single Edit version, which is my favorite version (well the unedited version is best, but only available on the Piano box sets as a music only version).
In any case, iTunes has only the Fade To Red videos available for those songs. I would like the originals. I have them on VHS, but that's considerably more work and requires more hardware than I currently have to transfer them individually and still would only be VHS quality when all is said and done. It would be nice if I could request the original videos.
In some cases, however, they DO have the original videos. For example, Mariah Carey's "Fantasy" video is the original one, not the DOB rap version, which I transferred along with all her other videos off her #1s DVD set. So now I have both versions, which is nice. I wish I could say the same for other videos I'd like to have.
tv. Better than I thought it would.
