Apple TV Already Being Hacked

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?"

Comments

Awesome!

[DurendalMac]

When I saw the AppleTV announced, my reaction was lukewarm, mostly due to limited format support. Apple can get away with it on iPods, because you don't generally put every piece of video you have on your iPod. Conversion isn't as much of a hassle as a result. With the AppleTV, you might as well stream every piece of video to your TV, and format support kills that. I'd rather get Core Duo Mac Mini that has more available options (like 1080p playback), add some adapters, and hook that up instead. Now that the AppleTV can support more formats, I must admit that it's looking like a more attractive option, although I'd still probably cough up the extra for a Mini.

Re:Awesome!

[CastrTroy]

I was very disappointed also. I thought it would be something more TV oriented rather than just something you could watch ITMS videos on. I think that apple could make a much better set-top box, with TV Tuner, big hard drive (at least 300 GB) and a remote, and an application like MythTV or SageTV. Really I don't see much of a use for the Apple TV. If they made it a more generic media centre box, they could probably kill off the windows media center market before it even gets noticed by most people.

yes offcourse they did intent that

[nietsch]

It's not very hard to forsee hacking of a small silent computer in a settopbox housing. There are countless sites that try to DIY such a thing. Now what happens if a popular brand introduces such a thing at an affordable price?
They will not sell that much more hardware directly, but the PR image they create with it is worth a lot, and all they had to do is produce something decent.
Linksys is a very good past example of this: their wrtg routers were nice to modify and already ran linux. I bought one for myself to play with and later advised my brother to get that brand. Marketing is easy if your customers start doing the selling themselves.

Why not ?

[Space cowboy]

MS had to be careful with their XBox, because they were adopting the Sony approach: sell the hardware at a loss, and make money on the software (games) afterwards.

Historically, Apple don't sell at a loss. I'm pretty sure that (even at the low price of $300 for a 1GHz/256/40G PC in that form factor) Apple will be making money off this - they don't care if you hack it.

In fact, the more hackable it is, the better - jo(e) public buys it so (s)he can watch their iTMS movies on the big screen, the geeks buy it to hack it. Box numbers go up either way, which helps Apple PR, and helps them persuade people they have *the* viable platform for the home.

I wonder how long it'll be before the USB-2 port is made available (it is running OSX, after all), at which point you get an external 1T drive on it as well, in one of the mac-mini style enclosures...

Simon.

USB2 tv tuner / DVR please!

[green pizza]

I want to see somebody make a USB2 TV tuner dongle for the Apple TV, or, failing that, an entire mini-DVR that provides its video to the Apple TV over a USB2 mass storage interface.

Apple TV is neat and all, but I still want to record most of my shows myself.

To illustrate my point: when the studios started selling TV series episodes on DVD, I didn't throw out my VCR and Tivo! I do continue to buy new movies and TV series on DVD, but I also still do a lot of recording of my own. One of my TVs has a built-in VCR that still gets a lot of use, as does my Tivo, especially for timeshifting 1 - 48 hours until I have time to watch my favorite shows... many of which I enjoy, but wouldn't want to buy on a commerical full season DVD.

Does that make any sense? Or am I the only one who still records?