Hackers upgrading Apple TV's capabilities

On 16-Apr-2007, at 15:56, Roy Morita wrote:
> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-04-15-appletv-hackers_N.htm

> It did not take very long.

Ah, no, it happened weeks ago. In fact, OS X running on the Apple TV
was done within days of availability. Leave it to USA Today to
report last month's news as "new".

On 23 March something awful had a thread of divx working on the Apple
TV. Yes, 24 days ago.

US Today:
> Many of these modifications would be tough for novices.

Anyone with an external USB 2.0 drive can apply all of these 'hacks'
with a trivial amount of effort involving nothing more difficult than
command-c and command-v (copy paste) and installing OS X on the
external drive.

As for the size of the hard drive, since the Apple TV is designed to
STREAM video, it is the size of your COMPUTER'S hard drive that
matters. Sure, you can put a larger drive in, but overall, it's
pretty silly and not worth the effort, much less the cost. Simply
connect your Apple TV to your LAN, point it at your media stuff, and
off you go. I just saw a 500GB SATA drive for $140 this weekend,
that's going to be far more useful than putting in a 120GB drive in
your Apple TV.

Google Kreme wrote:
 
> As for the size of the hard drive, since the Apple TV is designed to
> STREAM video, it is the size of your COMPUTER'S hard drive that
> matters. Sure, you can put a larger drive in, but overall, it's
> pretty silly and not worth the effort, much less the cost. Simply
> connect your Apple TV to your LAN, point it at your media stuff, and
> off you go. I just saw a 500GB SATA drive for $140 this weekend,
> that's going to be far more useful than putting in a 120GB drive in
> your Apple TV.

Maybe. I like having the option to play video from the Apple TV while my
computer is off. I'm not in the habit of leaving my systems on 24/7 [1].

Instead of swapping the internal disk, I'd want to connect a 3,5" disk
off the Apple TV's USB port, though.


1: I wonder if the Apple TV has a sleep mode.

Harro de Jong
 

On 4/18/2007 6:04 AM, "Google Kreme" wrote:
> As for the size of the hard drive, since the Apple TV is designed to
> STREAM video, it is the size of your COMPUTER'S hard drive that
> matters. Sure, you can put a larger drive in, but overall, it's
> pretty silly and not worth the effort, much less the cost.

As someone who's upgraded my Apple TV's hard drive to a 160GB model, I
respectfully disagree ;-) With the larger hard drive, I can get my entire
iTunes Library on the Apple TV, which means I can access that content even
if my computer is asleep or turned off. It also means that there's no chance
of buffer-lag when watching HD content.

I agree that this approach isn't "the way the Apple TV was designed," but it
works better for me.

On 4/18/2007 12:09 PM, "Harro de Jong" wrote:
> 1: I wonder if the Apple TV has a sleep mode.

Hold down the Play/Pause button for approximately six seconds and the Apple
TV will go into standby/sleep mode. (You'll know it's in standby mode when
the light on the front goes off completely.)

On 18-Apr-2007, at 13:09, Harro de Jong wrote:
> Instead of swapping the internal disk, I'd want to connect a 3,5" disk
> off the Apple TV's USB port, though.

That is the one thing that has not been hacked for the Apple TV yet.
In fact, there's currently a $1,000 prize for the first person to do it.

Booting off the USB, yes; using the USB as storage for the Apple TV?
Not yet.

On 18-Apr-2007, at 13:16, Dan Frakes wrote:
> On 4/18/2007 6:04 AM, "Google Kreme" wrote:
>> Sure, you can put a larger drive in, but overall, it's
>> pretty silly and not worth the effort, much less the cost.
>
> As someone who's upgraded my Apple TV's hard drive to a 160GB model, I
> respectfully disagree ;-)

Right, but for the cost of that 160GB drive you could have put in at
least 500GB in your computer AND not voided your warranty on the
Apple TV.

> I agree that this approach isn't "the way the Apple TV was
> designed," but it
> works better for me.

As long as you are aware of the risks. The Apple TV runs rather hot
as it is. Putting in a larger hard drive may well shorten its usable
lifespan if that drive runs hotter, as it likely will.

On 4/18/2007 1:43 PM, "Google Kreme" wrote:
>>> Sure, you can put a larger drive in, but overall, it's
>>> pretty silly and not worth the effort, much less the cost.
>>
>> As someone who's upgraded my Apple TV's hard drive to a 160GB model, I
>> respectfully disagree ;-)
>
> Right, but for the cost of that 160GB drive you could have put in at
> least 500GB in your computer AND not voided your warranty on the
> Apple TV.

The upgrade drive was only $109, which would get me a 300 to 400GB SATA
drive, but point taken. Still, that wouldn't solve either of the problems I
noted that upgrading the Apple TV's drive does.


>> I agree that this approach isn't "the way the Apple TV was
>> designed," but it works better for me.
>
> As long as you are aware of the risks. The Apple TV runs rather hot
> as it is. Putting in a larger hard drive may well shorten its usable
> lifespan if that drive runs hotter, as it likely will.

The Apple TV doesn't run much, if at all, hotter than the Mac mini or
Apple's laptops. It just feels that way because the top of the case acts as
a heat sink.

On 2007-04-19, at 08:43, Dan Frakes wrote:

> Hold down the Play/Pause button for approximately six seconds and
> the Apple
> TV will go into standby/sleep mode. (You'll know it's in standby
> mode when
> the light on the front goes off completely.)

Not that it's a 'real' sleep: from reading the support page it
appears standby mode only turns off the output:

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305375>

Does anyone know an easy way to get YouTube videos into iTunes? How about videos from the desktop?

On 4/24/2007 5:23 AM, "dtapper" wrote:
> Does anyone know an easy way to get YouTube videos into iTunes? How about
> videos from the desktop?

My favorite way to get YouTube videos into iTunes is TubeSock, which
automatically downloads and converts the video and then adds it to iTunes.

<http://stinkbot.com/Tubesock/>

(Keep in mind that most YouTube videos are encoded at very low resolution,
so they won't look great when played back at large sizes or on an Apple TV.)


As for "videos from the desktop," could you clarify what you mean?

On 4/24/07 6:23 AM, "dtapper" <dtapperhvc.rr.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know an easy way to get YouTube videos into iTunes? How about
> videos from the desktop?

TubeTV lets you download Google Video and YouTube videos and convert them to
iPod and/or AppleTV format in one step.

<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24679>

--
Nik :: gerberiNik.net
Make a developer cry! Vote for the top Mac software ever!
<http://www.squidoo.com/topmacsoftware/>

On 24-Apr-2007, at 06:23, dtapper wrote:
> Does anyone know an easy way to get YouTube videos into iTunes?

Visual Hub seems to do flv files.

> How about videos from the desktop?

?? Not sure what you mean.

On Apr 24, 2007, at 5:23 AM, dtapper wrote:

> Does anyone know an easy way to get YouTube videos into iTunes? How
> about videos from the desktop?

I use Firefox to access YouTube:

Firefox (free)
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

I use this free Firefox add-on to download YouTube videos to disk:

VideoDownloader (free)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2390

The downloaded videos can then be played by QuickTime or:

VLC (VideoLAN Client) (free)
http://www.videolan.org/

Sometimes the videos are in a format that won't play natively in
QuickTime. If you don't want to use VLC in that case, you can use
this free plug-in that allows QT to play just about any format video:

Perian (free)
http://perian.org/

___________________________________________
Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
___________________________________________