Fstoppers reporting that YouTube may start charging users to watch videos in 4K

From Alex Cooke at FStoppers.

Already I have been annoyed by YouTube, a recent update on Apple TV, has my TV showing a lost connection at every commercial break, which means huge delays on every commercial break. I have seen speculation that it might be the addition of HDR to the Apple TV app, which means that the commercials are different than the stream, and causing the lost connection and pause at every commercial break.

And as they add more commercials in every video it gets more annoying. And now it looks like they are moving 4K to the paid tier as well.

I can honestly say that it just doesn’t reach the $12 a month that is costs for YouTube premium, but it might mean I watch less YouTube videos.

New Apple TV announced with new remote and color balancing feature

 

3 days ago Apple announced a new Apple TV 4k with a new remote and A12 Bionic Chip. It supports higher frame rate HDr, Dolby Vision and 60 fps.

The coolest feature which should at least hit some previous models is part of tvOS 14.5 according to 9 to 5  Mac, is color balancing using your iphone. 

This will not color balance your tv, but instead the output of your Apple TV to correct for your TV’s color balance! Wow! Apple needs to make an SDK for this feature, as I would love to have it in Adobe Premiere and DaVinci resolve on my Mac!

It still doesn’t account for Apple’s weird color shifts on the Mac. Be interesting to see how this balances for your own clips played back on an Apple TV from Premiere or Resolve, but for streaming and purchased movies this should be a godsend.

So Apple TV+ shows are glitching on their Dolby Atmos mixes for me

 So I have an Apple TV 4K and when watching shows on Apple TV+ with an Atmos mix, the center audio channel will jump to the left or sometimes right for a few seconds at a time. This us especially noticeable  with narration, and is very distracting.

I have a Sony Receiver and it works great with Atmos with blu-rays, and I haven’t noticed the issue anywhere else except Apple TV+ programs. And if I turn off Atmos the problem goes away. I doubt it is the internet connection either as I have a 1TB fiber connection. 

I have seen others say they had the same issue but with Netflix on Apple TV, but I only have the issue with Apple TV+ shows. I have posted myself, but not gotten any response

Some issues with the otherwise excellent AirParrot

airparrot

I have been using the excellent AirParrot program to stream from my computer to my Apple TV. Mostly because there is no App for Showtime Anywhere on the Roku, iPad or Apple TV that will stream to the Apple TV or Roku. AirParrot allows us with older Macs to activate AirPlay streaming, and does a pretty good job of it, allow you to stream your screen or an individual app or window (the most useful for ShowTime anywhere, if you pop out just the video, so you just see the top bar of the browser window and the video) and it streams sound as well. This is great, and I will likely still keep the program around, just uninstalled (so I can re-install when I need it).

The reason I am keeping it uninstalled is it has been causing some issues with my sound on my MacPro. Specifically I was losing the 3 physical hardware settings in my Sound control panel. And I run my sound out through a Digital Out to an Emotiva DAC, but have lately had no sound options. Sometimes running Diskwarrior seemed to help, but as of today nothing was bringing them back, so I removed Airparrot and it’s installed plug ins (they have a removal tool that I could not find on their web site, though it talks about it, but when I tweeted them they quickly gave me the link http://t.co/bFYfDNoaFN, though I used the awesome Find Any File [and it is $7.99 in the app store] while holding down option to really find anything, and was able to remove the program and it’s installed file ) and after a restart my sound settings were all back. And hopefully they will stay that way!

New Apple TV does 1080p

Apple has released a 3rd generation Apple TV which now supports 1080p content. AppleTV
They have also upgraded the software, and second generation versions have already got the update. It is much easier to navigate and they have added Vimeo support as well, and Netflix now has 1080 support for streaming (though I no longer have Netflix as I am doing Amazon Streaming and using my Roku which already does 1080). And it keeps it same size and shape for $99 and comes out the same day as the new iPad, March 12th, next Friday.