The Hacked Apple TV

Here's the thing about the iPod. It was successful because it was a great portable MP3 player that you could use to play pirated content on. The iTunes Store came later and eventually Apple made a business case for purchasing songs online and getting legitimate content onto the device, but it didn't start with such lofty goals.

The same really can't be said about video, both portable and streaming around the home. There are many devices out there that do a wonderful job of playing back video (iPod included), but very few actually do a good job of playing back *any* video. We're finally at the point where some portable media players or digital media adapters will handle files like XviD/DivX, but now x264 content is becoming increasingly more popular and who knows how long it'll take the hardware guys to catch up.

Generally these aren't technical limitations, even though the CPU requirements of high bitrate x264 decoding are pretty high. For a long period of time, hardware makers were worried about supporting something like XviD simply because they had to maintain good relationships with content providers to avoid their devices being viewed as piracy boxes. The "harsh" reality is that users are going to watch XviD/DivX/x264 rips of content they don't legally own whether or not there's set-top box support; hardware costs are low enough that building a cool, quiet HTPC to keep next to your TV isn't such a bad thing anymore, but it's far from ideal.

Honestly what I'd like is to have all of my content on a multi-TB server, so there's no awkward fumbling of discs or anything like that, and simply stream it to any display device in the house. We're not quite there yet, but at least I found a use for the Apple TV I bought for our review back in March.

The Apple TV really has a very specific purpose: streaming content from iTunes. While that works just fine for music, I simply don't get all my video content from the iTunes Store. Thankfully, the Apple TV is just an x86 machine running a form of OS X and Front Row, so the hacking community has been able to do quite a bit with the device.

It connects wirelessly to a 2TB array I've aptly named "Gigantor" where I store all of my video content. The interface is incredibly quick and simple; it gets the job done and once hacked, it'll play just about anything. The device is quiet and given that it plays just about any type of file, I couldn't ask for more. The latest OS update to the Apple TV really screws with a bunch of the hacks and although there are ways around it, I prefer to stick with the original OS revision since it works just fine for me.

Honestly the biggest problem I have with the Apple TV is that it's not powerful enough to decode 720p/1080p x264 content. I'm hoping that future revisions of the platform will have a GPU with H.264 decode acceleration so I won't need to build a separate HTPC for higher quality content.

I'm working on building a home theater in my basement, where I plan on building Gigantor 2 (16TB maybe?) so I can rip HD-DVD/BD discs and store them there. I haven't really decided what I'm going to use as my HTPC but I'm sure you'll see a post about it here once I get to that stage in the process.

Head over to www.awkwardtv.org for information on hacking the Apple TV if you're interested.