Tag Archives: apple

Apple TV and iTunes Match

Posted on by by Todd Kulesza
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My 3rd generation Apple TV (with iOS 5) has some problems streaming media. First noticed it with NetFlix; the stream would pause for about 30 seconds every couple of minutes. iTunes Match had a different problem; after playing about 10 minutes of music, the screen would go blank (my TV started searching for different inputs, so I think the Apple TV’s output signal completely died), then return to the Apple TV home screen. I haven’t had any problems using NetFlix or iTunes Match on my computer, so I assumed the wifi (an Airport Extreme) and Internet connection weren’t to blame.

Finally seem to have tracked down the problem (or at least, one of them): it’s something in the Dolby Digital output. Go into Settings/Audio & Video/Dolby Digital and change the value to Off. I have my Apple TV hooked up to a receiver via an optical cable, so I’d turned this setting on to get surround sound. Since disabling, I’ve been able to listen to entire albums on iTunes Match for the first time—they had never made it past the 10 minute mark before. Here’s hoping a software update will fix this issue and restore the surround sound feature…

Update: Spoke too soon—just dropped the audio stream again, though it’s definitely not happening as consistently as before. *sigh*.

iOS 5.1 disabled iMessage

Posted on by by Todd Kulesza
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Not sure if anyone else has had this problem, but it looks like yesterday’s iOS 5.1 update turned off iMessage support, at least on my AT&T iPhone 4. A quick trip to Settings→Messages→iMessage was all that it took to get iMessages working again (they had somehow been turned off during the update).

Anyway, just posting in case someone else is trying to figure out why their iPhone suddenly stopped receiving iMessages.

Making the Apple Keyboard Play Nice with Windows

Posted on by by Todd Kulesza
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After a long, long love affair with Logitech, I’ve finally finished a slow migration toward Apple’s input devices.  Their aluminum keyboard took some getting used, but once I’d grown accustomed to it on my Macbook, I decided to get one for my Windows 7 desktop.  It seemed like everything was working perfectly until I pressed the mute button; nothing happened.  Volume down?  No go.  In fact, all of the media keys (volume up/down, mute, play/pause, etc.) refused to do anything. For whatever reason, SharpKeys and other keyboard mapping utilities don’t recognize Apple’s media keys.  The solution, it turns out, is to install a pair of Bootcamp files from your Mac OS X installation DVD.

Here are the steps that worked for me.  I’m running Windows 7 x64 with a 2010 Apple aluminum keyboard, and have a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installation disc.  As always, your mileage may vary:

  1. Insert your Mac OS X installation disc.  If it tries to auto-run anything, cancel it.
  2. Open Windows Explorer, right-click on your DVD drive, and select Open from the menu.
  3. Navigate to the Boot CampDriversApple folder.
  4. Copy BootCamp.msi (or BootCamp64.msi for x64 systems) to your desktop.
  5. Copy AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe (or x64/AppleKeyboardInstaller64.exe for x64 systems) to your desktop.
  6. Use a tool such as 7-zip to extract the AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe file.
    1. With 7-zip, can you do this by right-clicking on the file and selecting 7-Zip->Extract to “AppleKeyboardInstaller”.
  7. Navigate to the folder you extracted AppleKeyboardInstaller.exe to and run the DPInst.exe file to install the Apple keyboard driver for Windows.
  8. Click Start->All Programs->Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt, and select Run as administrator.
  9. In the command prompt, type “cd Desktop“.
  10. Install BootCamp by typing “BootCamp.msi” (or “BootCamp64.msi” for x64 systems) in the command prompt.
  11. Once the installation completes, you can delete the files on your desktop and remove the Mac OS X installation disc.  Reboot your computer and enjoy your new media keys!

April 2013 Update: I just tried this method using Windows 8 and the BootCamp drivers from Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Apple seems to be preventing the new BootCamp.msi  (version 5) from installing on non-Apple hardware, so the above method will fail on Step 10. Luckily I had an old copy of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion BootCamp drivers (version 4) which worked perfectly on Windows 8.

August 2013 Update: Thanks to Tom in the comments section, who pointed out that Apple’s Bootcamp update will install on non-Apple hardware, so we can use the latest Bootcamp drivers on Windows 8! On my machine, however, these new Bootcamp drivers set the time incorrectly after each reboot. The fix is to open up regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Double-click the RealTimeIsUniversal key and set its value to 0. Reboot and enjoy!