- [Host] Morning Trainiacs, we have something very exciting.
Today, we are upgrading from Zwift setup with this.
This is seriously what I've used, the old iPhone 5 SE,
to the Apple TV 4K.
Now, what we're gonna do, is I'm gonna walk ya through
how to set up Zwift on the Apple TV 4K,
and then I'm gonna give you some of the impressions
of the quality difference between this,
for in between $100 -$200, and this, free
if you've already got it,
but fairly costly if you don't have it.
I'm lookin' forward to this.
(upbeat music)
Alright, so the reason that I chose the Apple TV 4K
for the Zwift setup, is because after doing some research
on what the best bang for your buck Zwift setup is,
came down to this versus a full gaming setup.
Now, these are the two options that get you the very best
quality Zwift experience, as far as how good
the graphics are, how smooth the experience is,
how easy it is to feel like you're immersed in the game,
and sure, there are quality differences between
the Apple TV 4K and a full gaming setup,
but a full gaming setup might cost anywhere
between $1,000 and $2,000,
this is less than $200, so lets get into it.
Alright, so setup is pretty simple.
Basically you just unbox the few things
that come in the box.
So in the box you've got an Apple TV 4K brick,
you've got the cable, and you've got the remote.
Eveything comes charged, ready to go, out of the box.
You have to take all the wrapping off, then you have to plug
in the Apple TV 4K to the power source, and then there isn't
an HDMI cable, so you've got to make sure that you have
an HDMI cable that you plug into the TV, and there is
an optional direct line where you can directly hook up
a wired internet connection into the Apple TV 4K,
but in my case,
I'm just doing it off of the internet WiFi.
So then it's going to take you through all the prompts
to set up the Apple TV 4K, fairly simple, you can
just select to do it through your phone.
Bring the phone close to the Apple TV 4K
and just follow the prompts.
Once you do that, and you're logged in to the Apple TV,
turn on the TV and go to the Apple Store and search
for Zwift, and one of the cool things about the Apple TV 4K
is that you can now just say Zwift.
Zwift, and then it will spell Swift,
but it'll still find Zwift.
Now once you end up getting Zwift on, open the app.
You'll have to log into your account,
and then what you'll have to do is pair all of your devices
to the Apple TV 4K.
The issue with that, is that the Apple TV only allows
three connections to the device, so one is taken up
by the remote, another has to be taken up by
your smart trainer, so that leaves you to choose between
heart-rate monitor and a cadence sensor,
but we want all of 'em.
So what you can actually do, is you can use
the Zwift Companion app to do all of the pairing,
so what you can do is as you start setting up
all of the devices, it'll prompt you when you select
the third device, like the cadence
or the heart-rate monitor, and it'll say do you want to use
Zwift Companion to do the Bluetooth pairing, in which case
you say yes, you go to your phone, you open
the Zwift Companion app, you click in the bottom right,
where more is, click settings, click device connection,
and then make sure that that toggle switch is toggled on.
Now, if your like me and you've got devices all around
the place, might have a hard time selecting which ones
to connect, so you're just gonna have to go back and forth
a little bit, tryin' to disconnect and reconnect,
and you do that on the Apple TV with the remote,
and eventually, I had to switch from run and disconnect
my Stryd Foot Pod, so that it would recognize
the trainer as the power source.
If you do that, you're done.
It's all connected, and you are in the game,
and I get it, this is nice.
Let me go through this ride
and then I'll show you some sample footage.
(upbeat music)
Alright, so that's about two hours done,
at a little faster than Iron Man pace.
That hurt, that hurt.
Now, when I first started using this, the connection
with the cadence sensor, it wasn't really working.
It was only reading about 35 cadence.
The Wahoo KICKR also wasn't being controlled.
The climb wasn't being controlled by the KICKR,
but all I needed to do was go into the Wahoo Fitness app,
refresh all of those connections,
and that got everything sorted.
And then came back and all good again, but there is
a significant difference in quality
between this and the iPhone.
I'm gonna grab some footage, I'm gonna be running,
we're gonna put 'em side-by-side and I'm gonna show you
the difference in quality.
Experience is significantly better.
I need some food, whoa!
So, alright, Trainiacs, I've got a little bit of footage
here for us to take a look at, comparing two of the more
common ways to get Zwift on a TV.
Now of course you can do an iPad, that I'm not a big fan
of that because you get bars on the side,
but the orientation of an iPhone is the same
as most of the TVs out there,
so that's how you get the most screen real estate on a TV.
Now, one of the issues with using your phone
is that when you have a Airplay connection, and you've
just connected the phone to the TV via Airplay,
you end up getting a lot of skipping depending on
the reliability of the WiFi and the Bluetooth connection.
Now, you can, to improve that,
get a Lightning to HDMI adapter.
That ends up then draining a lot of the battery,
and if you don't have a spare phone, then you are using up
your phone, whereas with Apple TV, costs $100 -$200
depending on which one you get, and as I'll show you,
the quality is a lot better and you still get
all of that screen real estate.
So, lets go right back to the beginning
of this footage here, and I tried to ride basically
the same course, at about the same effort,
in New York.
On the left we've got the iPhone,
on the right we've got the Apple TV.
What you see, is that the detail in the trees, the leaves,
is significantly better on the Apple TV, so take a look
at the trees, and I recognize that this is
a recording of a recording,
but it gives you kinda the general impression.
Like here you know it's a tree,
but there you can see all the individual leaves.
You can also take a look at the road
as we're passing by here.
Here you know it's a road, but there isn't the same
texture and depth that you've got with the Apple TV.
Also, this is a really good example, as you come up
to things like barriers and things like this, archways,
you can see the shape of it, but lets take a look at it
in full view with the Apple TV, and what you can see
is that theres' just a ton more depth.
There's little bits of texture.
You've almost got a feeling of, well I guess,
texture and depth.
I'm running out of words to say, apparently.
Not good at thesaurus-ing.
Now also, take a look at the edges of the rider,
so we'll give you a really good example here,
and you can see the edges of all the riders around me
very, very crisp and defined, but now, go at it
the other way on the iPhone, and you see
that everything's just a little bit pixelated.
So, it's not as crisp, it's not as sharp.
Now, I wanted you to look here specifically at the flag.
So take a look at the flag as we come up to it here.
Now, you're probably not gonna see
a whole lotta texture or definition.
You're gonna know that it's a flag, and that's about it,
but if we can find a spot, basically perfect timing,
where we've got a flag coming up with the Apple TV,
what you should see is that there's little bits
of rippling and waves.
There you go.
So you can see just that little bit of rippling,
little bit of waves.
It helps give you a sense that you are actually in the game.
Now, obviously the color is going to be a fair bit richer
when you use the Apple TV 4K, because what it is,
is it's a 4K image that's scaled down to 1080P, HD.
That's actually what we do with these videos.
We shoot them in 4K, scale it down to 1080P,
because that gives you a really rich color,
if you don't have smudges on the lens.
One of the things that you have to know about that 4K
scaling down to 1080, is that it doesn't quite
scale perfectly, you do lose a little bit of real estate
on the edges, and the things it'll make a difference on,
is you might lose a cadence number when you go
over a hundred, so I was losing the one,
and I would just see 04, if my cadence was high.
Whereas with an iPhone, it's not as rich.
I mean, it's a great quality screen, but when you take
that image and you blow it up from something this size
to something this size, you're gonna lose a heck of a lot
of detail, whereas with the Apple TV 4K,
it's actually going the other way.
And of course, latency.
You don't have to worry about all the dongles and everything
to get this to work without skipping with the Apple TV 4K.
It's going to be instant,
and you're not gonna have any skipping whatsoever.
There's one other spot that I wanna show you here
that gives you a really good example
of the texture and the depth.
I wanna show you this right here.
Take a look at this pillar that's coming up on the left.
You know that it's a pillar.
You kind of have a good sense of the shape of it,
sort of square, but when we take a look at that with
the Apple TV 4K, let's see if we can speed that up,
you're gonna see that there's a heck of a lot of depth
and richness, and fine little details in there
that you don't get on the iPhone.
Oh, I like that!
So that's the differences between using an iPhone,
just via Airplay to get Zwift on your TV,
and just using an Apple TV 4K.
Significantly different, for only, I'm on BestBuy.com,
$180 - $200, which is far, far less
than the $1,000 - $2,000 that you could spend
on a gaming computer.
That's the next level up beyond the Apple TV 4K.
What you'll get with a gaming computer is a little bit
of shadows, and just a little bit more richness,
but in a lot of the videos that I saw,
it wasn't really that significatnly different,
and for the 5-10x different price tag,
I went with the Apple TV 4K, and I don't know,
I'm pretty into it!
So that's it Trainiacs!
If you aren't already following me on Zwift,
go follow me there.
It's gonna be Zwift season.
Once they come out with the team riding function,
the private function that we're gonna reserve
for Team Trainiac.
We are gonna be doin' some group rides there,
so you can follow me.
First name is T, last name is Riathlon Taren,
so I show up as Triathlon Taren.
But if you search Riathlon Taren as the last name,
I think I should pop up.
Go follow me there.
Improve your Zwift setup,
because it's Zwift season Trainicas, Zwift season.