Terrific walkthrough of the newly updated Remote app that lets you use your iPhone to control your Apple TV.
On the down side, you won’t be able to control your TV’s volume using the app (UPDATE: The Apple TV remote controls TV volume using IR, which the iPhone does not have)
On the up side, you’ll have a much larger screen space, more precise control of playing content, and a much better keyboard for typing in passwords and the like.
Watch the video to see all this in action.
The remote controls the volume with an IR sensor… though I wish they would allow the remote to act as a relay for the app if it is in range of the aTV – would be a neat trick and seems feasible.
Why?
Because Eddy Cue just don’t have vision to solve difficult technical problem, and he never care for it.
Not always, the Apple TV also supports HDMI-CEC for controlling external devices over HDMI. For TV and Home Theatre setups that don’t support it, however, it’ll fall back to IR.
It would be nice to give those that have HDMI-CEC enabled the option for volume control though.
This is to accommodate TVs that don’t have or use HDMI-CEC to adjust the volume.
Cool… didn’t know it did both. The aTV controls my TV inputs and power over CEC but the volume is still handled through the IR sensor (because when I block the sensor volume stops working). Perhaps my TV doesn’t support volume control over CEC and the aTV is smart enough to know that?
The solution is to add IR to your iPhone, which you can for about $10, but that’s not something Apple is going to build in.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=ired
dave – you’re a tech writer on one of the most popular apple tech blogs owned by a somewhat famous, somewhat apple insider. why don’t you know it doesn’t control volume because in most use cases this is done via IR from hardware on the physical apple remote?
stop trolling please. its a simply matter of hardware. iPhone does not and will never have an IR blaster built into it. get f’ing real, hater.
I wish I could like this a thousand times.
Oh, I don’t think they did. This is most likely a simple case of the writer’s TV being incompatible and him making the false assumption that the feature isn’t there.
Probably why Apple didn’t include one on the iPhone.
Not necessarily. Since it’s always on, like a Roku box, HDMI-CEC is limited.
Well, and the way people oddly want their old equipment (which might be ten years old and still working perfectly) to … keep working.
And for new equipment to keep working with their expensive, fancy universal IR remotes.
Bluetooth AVCRP is (as far as I can tell) capable enough and is now pretty mature (having been adopted in 2003 for v1.0).
Compatibility is, in its way, a feature, not pure “laziness”.
We might be approaching critical mass for a transition to BT remotes, though…
My AppleTV isn’t always on…
(I don’t think sleep counts as “on” for HDMI-CEC purposes, otherwise waking up wouldn’t turn on the TV, as I think it does.
I’m not sure, since I
A) Use a Logitech Harmony to control my stack, so stuff’s getting centrally controlled and
B) Have a pretty old TV, which might not even support HDMI-CEC power-on.)
If it’s plugged in and there’s no power switch, it’s always on.
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