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Apple TV Already Being Hacked

Posted by kdawson on from the let-me-at-it dept.

TunesBoy writes "Only a couple of days after being shipped, the Apple TV is already being modified in a variety of ways. A thread at Something Awful discusses installing VLC, and a dedicated site, AppleTVHacks.net, has appeared and is cataloging hacks including a hard-drive upgrade tutorial. Did Apple intend for the Apple TV to be so easy to upgrade and hack?"

1 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Huh?? Apple doesn't own those formats! by green+pizza · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here, Apple is only supporting formats THEY own, so they can spend the money on the hardware. Hacking it only drives up their market share, and to the complaint that people are watching all these unlicensed formats on it Apple can say "Hey, we didn't do it." But you still bought a box from them.

    According to the specs, the Apple TV supports AAC, MP3, AIFF, Apple Lossless, WAV, MPEG-4, H.264, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG.

    The only format Apple owns is Apple Lossless audio. The others are industry standards. AAC, Advanced Audio Coding, is part of the MPEG-4 specfication although I belive it doesn't need to be licensed (unlike MP3 which requires a per-machine license). MPEG-4 (aka MPEG-4 part 2) and H.264 (aka AVC: Advanced Video Coding aka MPEG-4 part 10) also require licenses.

    I'm not sure if JPEG requires a license, probably depends on the lawsuit of the day.