With Apple TV (2nd generation), you can configure your Screen Saver to use your photos by enabling photo sharing in iTunes 10.0.1 or later, then pointing to iPhoto, Aperture, or a folder of your choice.

To use your photos with Apple TV (2nd generation) Screen Saver, first make sure your Home Sharing account is enabled with the same Apple ID on both your Apple TV and your computer. Then follow these steps:

1. Open iTunes 10.0.1 or later.
2. In iTunes, from the Advanced menu choose Choose Photos to Share….
3. Enable the option to Share Photos, and then select the iPhoto, Aperture, or a folder you would like the Apple TV (2nd generation) screensaver to use images from.
4. On your Apple TV (2nd generation) , go to Settings > Screen Saver > Photos
5. Select your computer.
6. Select the folder or Event that you want the Apple TV Screen Saver to use photos from.
7. To confirm: On your Apple TV, go back to the previous screen by pressing the menu button on your Apple remote, then select the Preview option to see which photos are being used.

If you are sharing your personal photos from iPhoto, Apple TV (2nd generation) may take some time before recognizing any changes made to your photos within iPhoto. To accelerate getting modified photos or Events to your Apple TV, quit iPhoto after completing your changes and then open it again. If you’ve created new Events in iPhoto, make sure that they are selected in iTunes in the “Photo Sharing Preference” window.

Now that the dust has settled and you’ve read everyone (Engadget, Gizmodo, Tech Crunch) and their mothers take on the new Apple TV, I thought I’d give my two cents for what its worth. Being an original day one Apple TV owner the news for me today was all about rentals and streaming. Whether it be from our iTunes library, or from Netflix, we’re going to be streaming or renting from here on out. Lets face it, unless Apple introduced a terabyte version of the Apple TV, no form of internal storage would have been enough space. Users would of found a way to fill it up. The content now stays where it most likely originated, on your desktop or laptop computer.

As a father of a 3 year old I can think of a few occasions where immediate access to purchasing a movie or episode of Yo Gabba Gabba directly from the Apple TV came in handy, but those have been few and far between. As it was, purchasing a movie through the Apple TV meant waiting for who knows how long for the content to download. Purchasing from my computer as opposed to the Apple TV doesn’t seem like such a chore. Heck, the purchase can even happen through an iPad or iPhone as well.

Here’s a thought, will purchasing be the only way to get iTunes Extras, and will the Extras be available for streaming?

The one scenario where I can see problems arising regarding streaming is when that main library of iTunes content is no longer present to stream from. With more and more households turning to portable computers your SOL if that laptop or iPad with the main iTunes library decides to take a trip to the local coffee shop. This is where I hope Apple decides to create some sort of Airport media server or that fabled iTunes in the clouds so that your media is always available to stream.

For original Apple TV users who’ve struggled with scrolling through the tons of available content to find that perfect movie title or tv show to download, making the Apple TV a rental only box eliminates a load of extra purchase content to scroll through. This also means that to get a true overview of what movies or tv shows are available, including purchase only titles, you must do your search through iTunes. And lets not forget about Cinemira, I’ll be covering it’s relationship with the new Apple TV in another post.

And what about all this streaming goodness for existing Apple TV users? According to Engadget it looks like your going to have to upgrade to the new Apple TV as it seems Apple has no plans to upgrade existing Apple TV’s. Does that mean the current Apple TV will become valuable for it’s ability to store media locally? Yeah, probably nostalgic wishful thinking on my part.

As I learn more about this new Apple TV and absorb it’s new features I’ll share more thoughts, but for now just enjoy the fact that Apple is paying attention to our now even smaller little hobby.

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In the Living Room, Hooked on Pay TV

These are confusing times in the living room. The proliferation of Internet video has led to much talk of “cord-cutting” — a term that has come to mean canceling traditional pay TV and replacing it with programming from a grab bag of online sources.

But so far Americans are not doing this in any meaningful numbers. “Nor is there any evidence of it emerging in the near future,” said Bruce Leichtman, the president of Leichtman Research Group, which studies consumer media habits.

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I’ve considered dumping my cable provider many times, in particular my crappy Cox service in San Diego, but sports is the hold up for me. Cox just happens to hold the exclusive right to all San Diego Padres games as well.

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Why will this change everything?

• iOS TV Applications: Expect to see an iPhone/Pad like marketplace for television applications. Video sharing/streaming/recording apps, interactive news apps, and of course games.

•The iPad will turn into one big badass remote control: The iPad will be the preferred input device for the iTV. You’ll be able to editing videos, control games, and extend the interactive television experience. Imagine watching monday night football on the TV while viewing/exploring other camera angles on the iPad.

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I want to thank everyone for their patience while we resuscitated our web app, with a special thanks to our genius in his dungeon Mr.Miles. Please enjoy Cinemira once again.

To say this outage has been an embarrassment would be an understatement. Yes this is a beta service which we charge no fee to use, but it’s still a bothersome problem for all concerned non the less. Whats the point of offering a service when it’s not reliable. Chalk this up to one more learning experience for a small team.

In the mean time, until we can get Cinemira fully armed and operational again I will be posting updates old school until that is no longer needed.

Again sorry for the inconvenience.

The first review out of the blocks from Evan will be Crazy Heart, a new addition to the iTunes Store which stars Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges. Keep your eyes out for that later this morning.

Welcome aboard Evan!

So much for the Netflix advantage. Websites all over the net are reporting on the new agreement in which Netflix has entered with 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios. All though this agreement means a larger Watch Instantly movie library for Netflix, it also means that it won’t carry new release titles until 28 days after their initial release. The first big titles this affects will be Avatar from 20th Century Fox, and Universal’s It’s Complicated. Both of these titles are currently available for pre-order in the iTunes Store and are scheduled to be released the day of the DVD release.

So if you don’t want to wait 28 days to watch these and other movies, sign up for a free Cinemira account and add them to your Will Call Stack, which will notify you the day they are available to rent.

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• You have 30 days to watch the movie after the download completes. You can start watching the movie while it is still downloading.

• Once you’ve started to watch the movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching the movie (even if you start watching before the download is complete). You can watch the movie as many times as you want within this 24-hour period.

• The rented movie will expire when either the 30 day or 24-hour limit is reached. Once the rental expires, the movie is automatically deleted. You must re-rent and download the movie to view it after your rented movie has expired.

• You can move the movie between devices as many times as you wish during the rental period, but the movie can only be played on one device at a time. If you rent the movie on your Apple TV, it is not transferable to any other device and you must watch it on your Apple TV.

• On your device, the time remaining for you to finish watching the movie appears near the movie title.

• You can only play your rented movies on the computer you rented it from and only if it is authorized to play your iTunes Store purchases and rentals.

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For more The More You Know posts head over to our section of the same name.

I guess its that time of the year when award shows and award events seem to pop up from every corner of the web. Even our little corner of the world in San Diego finally has its very own web awards called #influenceSD and Apple Movie Junkie is up for one. Specifically we’ve been nominated for the San Diego Blog of the year. I have no idea what the blog of the year in San Diego entails, but it sounds like fun. If you get a second feel free to head over to #influenceSD, click on the little arrow next to our name, and show us some junkie love.

Update – Incase anyone is still interested in what came with the update the following is from Apple’s official support page.

Apple TV Software update 3.0.2 includes fixes for Genius playlists, MobileMe gallery photos, iTunes U content, Internet Radio, and other media-related features. The update also includes performance and connectivity fixes for Apple TV.

Along with the announcement of ATVJ becoming the official blog of Cinemira we’ve revamped our Coming Soon page. The page now lists iTunes pre-order movie titles. We aren’t listing every last pre-order title available in the iTunes Store but more of the well known high profile movies. We think this new revamped pre-order page will be the ultimate companion of Cinemira’s Notification tool so that you know the moment your favorite movie becomes available for purchase or rent.

As we wind down initial testing of Cinemira and begin to plan the transition from our blog based movie updates to the automated ones coming with Cinemira, the big question for us was what to do with ATVJ. We knew we had way to much time and energy invested in this blog, not to mention you, our dedicated visitors. So we thought a natural fit for ATVJ would be as the official blog of Cinemira.

What this means is that as Cinemira takes over the majority of the daily movie related updates, we’ll use ATVJ to pass along news and updates related to Cinemira along with our smaller updates such as the weekly $.99 cent movies, top five movie rentals and top five movie sales. A new regular post we’ll be including is the listing of new pre-order movies as they become available. We think this pre-order info will become a very useful companion to what Cinemira will be offering. We don’t expect much else to change around here other then maybe a little bit more of Cinemira’s colors.

For people who are worried about the changes coming to ATVJ and are still not familiar with Cinemira we encourage you to visit www.cinemira.com. We are confident you’ll find that everything you ever wanted in a Apple TV & iTunes movie discovery tool is coming very soon.

We know we’ve been a little slow with official Cinemira news lately but let me assure everyone that we are hard at work on tightening up every last bit of Cinemira DNA and are eager to debut a Beta version soon. In the mean time we’ve made a transition here at ATVJ. We’ve replaced our old manual process for gathering new HD movies for our daily list with the brains of Cinemira. What this means for all ATVJ visitors is a much more accurate list of new HD movies added to iTunes everyday, or at least until Cinemira comes online. We might even be able to tell you what movies have been removed as well. Stay tuned!

For those of you interested in seeing Cinemira in action, head on over to the Cinemira Posterous blog to watch an overview we created of Cinemira’s main features. We plan on creating even more in depth videos as production on Cinemira progresses.

Cinemira’s Posterous

Update - The video is now available at http://www.cinemira.com

BuzzSugar is kicking off their annual Golden Globes ballot contest! If you pick the most correct winners in their 25 categories, you could win a 160 GB Apple TV and $300 from iTunes to fill it up with your favorite Globe-winning TV shows and movies!

To enter just head over to their contest page and start filling out your ballot. You’ll have until noon PST on Jan. 17 to join the fun. You must be a registered member of the PopSugar Network to play, so if you’re not registered, click here to sign up. For the official rules, click here.

Good Luck!

Lets face it, the movie studios have a stake in what gets promoted on the main landing page of the iTunes Movie Store or on the Apple TV. They’re going to push what they think you should be buying or renting. Don’t get me started on the fact that at least half of the movies that are visibly promoted are only available for purchase and not for rent. Add to this the “viewing window of availability” for new titles, allowing the movie studios to remove movies all together, which can make finding a movie you want to rent or purchase that much more challenging.

Apple TV Junkie has set out to overcome these issues by seeking out and discovering newly available iTunes and Apple TV HD movies, finding hidden iTunes movie gems, and digging up the movies which had once disappeared. The idea for us was to find and push as much of this hidden movie content out of iTunes and onto the web as frequently as possible. It’s obvious that Apple is looking to move the iTunes Music Store experience to “the cloud“, we want to do the same for the iTunes Movie Store. We want to bring the entire iTunes Movie catalog out from behind iTunes and onto the web. The challenge for us at ATVJ is doing all this within a “blog” structure. The flexibility to do all that we want is just not there. This is all about to change.

Finish over at http://cinemira.posterous.com… or continue reading.

For the better part of the last year, our small but dedicated, hard working, and bootstrapy team has been working on a more robust solution to managing your iTunes movie catalog and discovering new content, this solution is called Cinemira. Cinemira is being built from the ground up to not only be the successor to Apple TV Junkie, but to be the ultimate management and discovery tool for all iTunes movie watchers. Cinemira is being built using the open source framework Cappuccino, which will give it a desktop application like experience in your browser.

Cinemira is not a complete replacement for iTunes the application. What Appsaurus is to the iPhone App Store, Cinemira is to the iTunes Movie Store. You still need iTunes to rent or purchase a movie. Cinemira will give you movie management tools which iTunes does not offer. Cinemira gives you the ability to search through the entire iTunes Movie catalog or focus your search to only iTunes or Apple TV HD movies, receive alerts when your favorite movie becomes available to rent, keep track of the daily HD movie additions to the iTunes catalog, and keep track of your personal iTunes movie collection. All this from your favorite browser and operating system. It’s no longer necessary to fire up iTunes in order to manage your iTunes movie collection, all you need is a browser and access to the internet. Most of these features iTunes currently lacks.

To start, the focus of Cinemira will be on the management and discovery of iTunes movie rentals. All though you can search and find any movie in the iTunes movie catalog with Cinemira, finding a rental version of a particular movie is always most difficult. The Cinemira team is looking to the end of January for an Alpha launch. Most importantly, Cinemira will be completely free for all, but only through your support and use of Cinemira will we be able to continue its development. Head on over to http://www.cinemira.com to learn more. We’ll be adding more information to the site and this blog as the launch moves closer. If you have any questions regarding Cinemira or its development please feel free to email us at admin at cinemira dot com. Thank you.