ATT TV - a little review

Yep, that’s a good price for the Ultra for sure.

Also, the Ultra supports ATMOS for Apple’s TV+ app which the FireTV doesn’t. Seems that search for the ‘one box’ is still just a search, huh?

 

The remote issues are mostly with working with some live streaming apps. In general trickplay is the biggest issue because of that blasted trackpad. But for those live streaming apps that will do trickplay with SIRI it isn’t such a big deal.

TVE is fine if you tolerate non-skippable ads.

For me the FireTV is the best ‘one box’. Supports all the streaming apps, Recast integrates nicely with it and I can also view my outdoor security cameras with it. When I shift to Sling next spring then the ATV comes back into play probably.

 

I’ve got a Harmony Elite and haven’t used it in quite awhile. Not because it isn’t excellent but because of the foibles of the non-standard HDMI-CEC. Logitech recognizes the issue and recommends turning it off, but when you do that ARC suddenly becomes not so good at all, which means if you hook direct to TV and back to sound system with HDMI-CEC off you need to use optical, which is limited to DD5.1.

When I had an audio system that only did 5.1, that was fine, but I’ve moved on from that. Or I could use an HDMI switch but most of them have their own quirks.

I will admit that playing around with the various boxes introduces most of the issues. If I were to pick either the ATV4K or FireTV as the sole box I could accomplish all I need to with what I have now. I could even figure out how to not hate that blasted trackpad on the ATV remote!

 

Yeah, and that would be of enough interest to actually do if I didn’t live by myself. What I have gets the job done for me and the few times a year I have company where more than one TV is on at a time it hasn’t been an issue either.

BTW, I’ve got both Recast and AirTV Anywhere, both 4 tuner, 1TB OTA DVRs. Recast works great but only works at all with FireTV other than some minimal use with the FireTV app on a phone or tablet.

AirTV Anywhere works pretty much everywhere, including out of home. Uses the SlingTV app which is on everything I’ve seen. It isn’t quite as good as Recast if the broadcast station’s signal is a bit degraded.

Major downside of both is that neither support search of the broadcast program schedule.

 

Yes and no.

If you are consistently using just a group of certain streaming services, then you can use quite a few boxes to accomplish that.

But, one of the biggest benefits to streaming is that you can control what you have available and the costs by not being tied down to any particular service. So to somewhat future proof I would think that getting the box that supports all or nearly all of the services makes more sense. These days that is AppleTV or FireTV if you aren’t averse to sideloading a couple of apps.

Roku’s are out as you can’t sideload, or at least I haven’t seen a way. And you can only mirror and not cast to Roku’s. And as of today’s Streamable article, AirPlay 2 is showing up on some minor number of users for the Ultra but it seems HBO Max is being blocked.

 

I don’t know of any universal remote that supports Siri or any voice. The long press isn’t supported by default but you can program another button to do it.

 

Does anything actually play well with HDMI-CEC? Lots of mfgs of soundbars and such talk about disabling it which happily chatting about what ARC brings to the setup. Carefully not mentioning much about how ARC depends on HDMI-CEC being active.

A couple examples:
Roku Ultra 2019 - oft times it just captures the TV port with CEC active. This only seems to happen when the ATT TV Osprey box is also using a TV HDMI port. Disconnect either one and things go pretty well.

Except sometimes when bringing up the ATT TV Osprey box the TV switches ports, the Nakamich Soundbar switches ports, and will do that for a bit until it finally decides not to. What it ends up on is anybody’s guess. Fortunately it doesn’t happen very often, UNLESS that damned Roku is plugged in, then it happens more often than not.

 

I don’t have an AVR, I have the Nakamichi Shockwafe 7.1.4 Atmos Soundbar setup. Sony TV, ATV4K, ATT box, FireTV and Roku Ultra. The Naka is twitchy with CEC IMO, but then so is the Roku and ATT box. The only two that don’t give issues when hooked to the TV and feedback via ARC to the soundbar are the FireTV and ATV4K.

The most irritating part is that sometimes it all works just like it should. Push power on whichever remote, box, tv, speaker all come up properly with proper inputs selected. Then other times it seems like it just loses its marbles and switches around Willy-nilly!

Today I decided that the only two streaming boxes I care at all about are the ATT box because of the superb remote, and the FireTV Cube because it supports the AppleTV+ app. And of course, a Blue Ray player. The Naka has 3 HDMI inputs so I’m just using them and have taken CEC and ARC out of the picture.

If/when Apple gets off the dime and comes out with a Siri remote that does away with the miserable trackpad, I’ll re-evaluate. Neve understood why Apple thought that miserable trackpad was better than a d-pad.