To New Beginnings!
Who doesn’t want to sit on their couch, and be able to view all his content in the best quality possible, with all bells (Dolby Vision) and whistles (Dolby Atmos) without lifting a finger? After many months of development and extensive testing, Astrape app for tvOS is finally live. Let me tell you the story.
I am a very long time Apple TV user. I own an Apple TV device since it’s 2nd generation, and I am not talking about the 4k version but the trully 2nd generation which was a gift back in 2011. I can’t start enumerating all the hardles that I’ve been through trying to play my videos.
The limitations of first generations of Apple TVs
At first when there was no App Store, the only way you could play a video from your iPhone or your Mac, was to Airplay it. Obviously the big size bandwidth videos were struggling to pass through the WiFi or 100Mbit Ethernet, so they had to be transcoded.
Things changed in the fall of 2015, when Apple released the Apple TV HD (the 4th generation) running tvOS, and along with it the first App Store for the TV. For the first time, developers could ship real apps on the big screen, not just the channels Apple had picked for us. Media apps like Plex and Infuse were among the first to show up.
A few months later, in early 2016, VLC landed on tvOS too. That was a really big deal for Apple TV owners. VLC brought its own decoders, so it didn’t care what Apple’s player supported: MKV containers, DTS and AC3 audio, all kinds of subtitles, codecs that would never play through AirPlay without transcoding. You could play your own network shared URLS from your phone. Not everything was perfect. Apple TV HD maxed out at 1080p and no HDR content could be played from it.
4K, HDR and Dolby Vision launched in not so much later, with Apple TV 4k first generation adding support for all three in 2017. OLED TVs with 4K and HDR support had already launched but in most homes they became the new norm around 2020 along with the COVID pandemic where everyone was buying a new TV to get through the lockdown. At least in Greece that happened because we had two very severe lockdowns.
The arrival of HDR-capable devices
So, the theme was now this: Brand new OLED TV with HDR10+ and Dolby Vision capabilities, Apple TV 4K already bought from the previous years, but no way to browse through your movies and shows sitting on your computer or your NAS. That’s not actually accurate because Infuse already existed but at a very hefty price, with a subscription required, so it really wasn’t an option. I never bought that subscription, because all well-known software had already become a subscription-based Software As A Service, without providing much more value than the previous licence based model of paying once and forget kind of thing. So I was really tired of that model and I never gave up.
Remuxing by hand
Instead what I did for years, was to remux all my videos, to an Apple TV friendly format and that really was a horrendous experience. I had my list of shell commands, to battle every problem, learned tones of stuff for Dolby Vision tags, profiles, compatibility modes for Apple TV, converting the audio tracks if it was necessary, fixing subtitles metadata and the list goes on. All that preperation had to be done for each movie, and sometimes -I tell you- if a movie was not prepared beforehand, I had to do it late at night, while others had to wate patiently for a whole hour.
Creating an app for it was a very difficult job to do, even if I was already an experienced iOS developer for many years already. Eventually, AI could solve complex problems and was pretty good at coding too. So I sit down with it and created the app I always wanted.
Astrape
Astrape was born! After months of development and countless amount of testing, sleepless nights and so on, I’m proud to announce it is finally here! You can add all your sources, from your NAS, from your Backblaze B2 or any other S3 service, to the app and a curated AI algorithm manages to organize all your Movies and TV Shows with great accuracy, and leave all personal videos and non related to Movies and TV shows to All Locations, a nice table style browser for all your sources.
Just describe it
In Astrape, I’ve tried to make the process of finding your Movies as easy as possible, I’ve put a lot of effort into it and I really can’t wait for your feedback on this! In the search section, you can write the title of the movie or show that you want, or if you like you can just describe it and the best matches will come up. In my testing, this worked absolutely fantastic and in multiple languages too! I tried to find an english movie using greek language and it worked flawlessly.
Another good way to find your content, is in the bottom of the Movies/TV Shows, the bottom you reach if you have not yet found what you were looking for in the categories. There you can just start from the first letter of your movie and then letter by letter you will see the results below updating and the search narrowing up until you reach that movie you were looking for. That’s one of my favorite ways to find content in the app, because it’s so fast. Just try it and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Built to play anything you throw at it
The testing on the numerous kind of video and audio codecs and containers is very extensive. I am so confident that you can play the hardest, most bandwidth-hungry videos that I would put a bet on. My drone, records it’s videos on H264 100Mbit (instead of a more logical choice of H265 that would save half the bandwidth with the same quality) and the app barely notices it. Dolby Vision, HDR10/HDR10+, HLG, multi-channel Dolby atmos audio, really all the formats that the app can play, are really so numerous to name them all here.
Astrape Companion for Mac
Astrape Companion for Mac send any file or link from your Mac to your TV. Astrape Companion is also another huge quality of life feature. It can share videos, folders or even whole disks that are connected to your Mac, so that you don’t have to run any kind of server to play your videos! Even if your Apple TV doesn’t support a specific video codec, Astrape Companion automatically transcodes it with hardware acceleration that is built-in your Mac.
To wrap all this up Astrape for tvOS is the app that makes it easier than ever, to play any kind of video files, whatever way it is most convenient for you, and enjoy it with your friends and family in your living room. Go on give it a try, Astrape is free for a week then a one time pay of $9.99. No subscriptions ever. That’s a promise.