Watch All the Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Watch All the Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers (2015)

benjaminmayo.co.uk

66 pointsrafaelc26 comments

Pity there isn't a single one from the southern hemisphere. That said, they are gorgeous. I'd just like to see something from the other side of the globe.

There should be some new 4k ones. They demo'ed them at the recent Apple event.

Hmm.

Open question to anyone with the latest tvOS firmware sitting around: what happens if you grep it for `entries.json`? Do you get a different URL?

Obviously what I'm getting at is ways to try and find (or keep an eye out for) the latest URLs.

This (https://sylvan.apple.com/Aerials/2x/entries.json) appears to be the new URL for all the screensavers. The new entries file includes both normal and HDR versions of each of the screensavers, though on non-HDR displays, the SDR versions look a lot better than the (converted) HDR ones [1]. Unfortunately, all the new screensavers are encoded using HEVC [2] so they can't easily be played on OS versions without native support.

[1]: https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/issues/378#issuecomment...

[2]: https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/issues/378#issuecomment...

Wow, that was awesome reading how the new URL was obtained!

Thanks very much.

John Gruber noted [1] that you can see a swimming pool with 2 sharks in it in one of the 4K Dubai day flyovers, though I haven't found them yet...

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/09/thoughts_on_apple_tv_4k

Edit: Could be bottom right of Dubai, day, 1?

Dubai, day 4, at the 2:30 mark, left hand side. I'm pretty sure they're just painted on the bottom of the pool, not actual sharks.

Because Screensavers don’t save screens anymore maybe we should call them energy wasters instead.

With the usage of OLED that’s not quite true, burn-in can happen again which is an odd thing. Easier to fix than it was though, apparently.

It’s more image retention. I’ve used my lg oled to show quite a bit of static images over the last year and haven’t had anything permanent. There’s even a tool built in to help clear it up.

OLEDs could be turned off almost instantly for standby though.

These are nice, to be sure, but in the spirit of artificial pixel scrambling, I can't help offering an antithesis:

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/5849/plasma-tunnel-saver

Still my favourite.

You might like Electric Sheep [1] as well then.

My fav is the Word of the Day. It shows a nice blue background which doesn't hurt the eyes, with a word of the day. Though I don't use a screensaver on my MBP anymore; it needlessly drains the battery. Instead, I made a small Python program which selects a random word and shows the meaning for that word, using dict. Now that I think of it I could've used the current date as seed plus some calculations to come up with a stable word throughout the day which changes daily.

I also like the Chromecast one with photos from the past, tho a bit confronting Google has all that data.

[1] https://gold.electricsheep.org/

Anyone here who can point towards using them as Windows Screensavers?

Chrome lets me download the video files - so it's just a matter of saving them to your local disk/NAS and using a video-as-screensaver program that supports MP4 files (so any DirectShow-based player on Windows 8 or later will do).

Windows screensaver: https://github.com/cDima/Aerial Mac screensaver: https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial

brew cask install aerial

For those that are wondering: this installs these screensavers on MacOS. https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial

Does it download the videos themselves onto your local mac or does it stream them like the AppleTV does ?

I've tried it out and it appears to stream them, however, there's an option to cache the videos locally.

It caches them. Uses a ton of space though, so be careful.

Yep, 11GB.

Anyone know how to make this work for Kodi, especially as audio visualization? (I don't mind downloading the videos first)

http://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:Aerial, actually installed it earlier today, had to reboot after, to get the downloads working

This slide show became available on Kodi about 6 months back and makes for an awesome screensaver

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