Hacker News Reader

Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I just discovered last week that on the Apple TV I can connect 2 apple audio devices at the same time.

Currently staying with the in laws, daughter is sleeping in the same room with us so we couldn’t watch TV.

I connected my wife’s AirPods to the Apple TV to watch tv and noticed I could connect another one, so I borrowed my sister in laws AirPods and connected them and both work at the same time. So now we can watch TV together when daughter is asleep.

It only works with apple audio devices, so looks like I’ll pick up some new AirPods for myself!

Edit: contacted > connected

View on HN

For people who are interested in this and don't have/want to buy apple stuff: the Chromecast 4k allows this with any bluetooth audio device. It definitely is a super handy feature!

Chromecast Bluetooth was prohibitively laggy in my experience.

Any experienced to the contrary, I wonder?

I was also pretty disappointed with my chromecast in general, but bluetooth audio was fine. Not great, but fine.

I haven't tried doing this with Apple TV, but iPhones also let you share your audio with a second pair of AirPods.

This is great. I love watching stuff with my wife on airplanes.

I've been doing this with an Nvidia Shield 4k tv for so long I cant watch tv without headphones.

Does it really only work with Apple headphones?

That's terrible. I like Apple products but I hate the way they push to make things proprietary that could be open standard.

I guess that makes services "sticky" for a lot of people but it pushes me away from the ecosystem,

Apple should want their customers to choose their products because they’re better. Arbitrarily reducing compatibility is a sure fire way to make your customers resent you.

the whole point of apple is that they choose for you

It’s less that they are reducing compatibility and more that they saw limitations in BlueTooth and built extensions into their devices to handle additional use cases.

And vice-versa:

> AirPods require Apple devices running iOS 15.1, iPadOS 15.1, watchOS 8.1, tvOS 15.1, or macOS Monterey, all available as free software updates next week.

Playstation 4 (maybe also the 5? I can't get ahold of one, so I dunno) controllers have a headphone jack on them that can be used this way, I think. Route the audio through the (bluetooth) controller, to whatever you've plugged in to it.

I think some higher-end Rokus can route audio through their remote control, to plugged-in headphones.

All Roku devices (and Roku TVs) should be able to route audio through the app to attached or wireless headphones as well. This might work with Share Audio on iPhones so you can have two people listening at once, but I've never tried.

Oh yeah, I forgot about routing Roku audio through phones. I've seen that on the remote app.

last time I tried it , I found Roku audio via the app to be very laggy and sound cutting out often. This is despite having good wireless signal and no lag from anything else that uses wifi for steaming.

that's too bad. it worked well for me, but I never used it regularly.

My Samsung TV has this feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com