The Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers | Hacker News Reader

The Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers

benjaminmayo.co.uk

95 pointscoloneltcb35 comments

My favorite so far is New York City at night, GTA 2 style [0].

[0] http://a1.v2.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/us/r1000/000/Fea...

I didn't see any marching bands. Great link though, thanks.

There's an osx screen saver picking the same video feeds:

  brew cask install aerial

You can also just download the file from the Github page: https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial.

Note that if anyone wants to commit heresy and use these screensavers on their Android TV (or any other Android) device, they can use Aerial Dream (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff...) and set it as default under Settings -> Daydream :)

I use this on my Shield TV and it's great. I also have an ATV4 as android AirPlay doesn't work nearly as well. Makes it confusing sometimes to tell which input the TV is on haha.

Woah. I totally missed the news about nvidia's android TV device. Is it too locked down or buggy (my main critique of most android TV devices)?

I think it's the best equivalent to an Apple TV in the Android ecosystem. Great performance and 4k, but way less apps (notably no Amazon Prime TV app).

If you're into cord cutting they do have an app for Sling streaming cable service.

Chromecasting to it is straightforward, and on par with Airplay. That was the one thing holding me to iOS for a long time.

> but way less apps (notably no Amazon Prime TV app).

Doesn't it use the Google Play Store?

I agree with the best STB, at least all the ones I've used recently.

There's an unofficall Amazon Video app that I've been using for quite awhile with little problems, the ShieldTV does use the Google Play Store and I've used other stores like Aptoide and AptoideTV.

Depends on what do you mean by that. nVidia ShieldTV is currently probably the best STB on the marked, it can hardware decode anything you throw at it (including VP9 and 10-bit H265), is less buggy than the reference Nexus Player and has access to most big network apps.

Large exception is Amazon's stuff, because Amazon deliberately refuses to support Android TV because they're pushing their own crap.

I have been using them as screensaver for a while now. Here it is: https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial

Installable through Caskroom via

    brew install Caskroom/cask/aerial

These videos look amazing on just about any screen. I've got a 15" MBP Retina connected to a 34" Dell Ultrawide and I've caught people just _staring_ at the big screen with many of these videos.

Which brings us to one often debated question in our company: Are those screensavers real footage or animated? Anybody has an idea on the making of?

I believe they are real footage. I've read that they were shot from helicopters and drones using a stabilized RED Dragon @120fps, played back at 24fps.

OT but there is a very cool video from Davin Graham on how such a drone looks like while he was filming at Milford Sound, New Zealand https://youtu.be/l59Svj2E4lk?t=1m35s.

Edit: here is the final footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMGSrS_2R6I

They are definitely real. In the SF one that goes over the bridge, you can see the shadow of the filming helicopter at the bottom of the screen.

And when the lens flares show up at the beginning of SF you can really see how hard the image stabilization is working to keep the image steady.

I've been running these as a Kodi screensaver for a few months now, but it pains me that they aren't 4k! Not a big deal for 1080p movies sitting back 12 feet, but this kind of stuff is like artwork hanging on my wall; I walk up to it, so every pixel counts. I hope that they're shot in 4 or 8k and Apple is sitting on hi-res versions until the Apple TV can support them.

I appreciate the publicity, but I first posted this in October 2015. Any reason why it is gaining traction today?

It looks (from searching past submissions[1]) like this was the first time it was posted to HN (surprisingly).

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=benjaminmayo&sort=byDate&dateR...

If you want to download them all

curl http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/scripts/apple-tv-screensavers.json | jq .[].assets[].url | xargs wget

jq?

presumably a jquery CLI tool

https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

I specifically don't give instructions for this as the copyright of these videos is unclear.

Is there anyway to get this to play on the Windows 10 logon screen, instead of a picture background? I found the Windows version for the screensaver on the link below, but no way to set it as the logon background.

https://github.com/cDima/Aerial/

I wish there were footage of a large urban area in China. Would there actually be too much pollution to get a clear shot in most areas?

Has anyone done a Windows screen saver of these?

If not, then I will.

found on GitHub, not tested: https://github.com/cDima/Aerial/

Just skimmed through the code. It's nicely done (way neater code than I'd ever write). Seems to pull down each video to stream directly, unless cached locally (toggable), there's also some/day night code in there, and it supports multi monitors.

Totally usable and saves me a job. Cheers!

Every time I see the screen saver with The Great Wall, it blows my mind that the wall is 5,500 miles long.

San Francisco "Night #5" is actually morning.

Will these actually work as screensavers. If you loop the same video(s) over and over again... seems like burn in could still occur.

Is this copyrighted?

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