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?"

Probably on purpose

[LegionX (691099)]

That way they'll save a lot on support (you hacked it, then we don't support you). And later it'll be a lot easier to "open it up" to comply with EU ruling ;)

USB2 tv tuner / DVR please!

[green pizza (159161)]

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?

Re:USB2 tv tuner / DVR please!

[ThinkingInBinary (899485)]

It makes perfect sense. I have one of these [amazon.com] DVD recorders, and I use it to do essentially the same thing. One DVD-RAM holds up to 8 hours of TV, so it works great for catching up on TV that runs late at night or when I'm too busy to watch it. Of course, I'd prefer a MythTV box with a nice big RAID array, but this was a lot cheaper. (It even came with a DVD-RAM disc!) It basically works like a "poor man's TiVo" when you use a DVD-RAM disc--you can watch a show off the disc while recording another (although seeking doesn't work as smoothly when it's doing two things at once), and you can start recording at any time and just press "Play" to jump back to where you started recording. (You can also tune the TV to another channel, like you can with a VCR.) It can schedule recordings, and is very diligent about cueing up the recording one minute before it starts, to make sure it's ready to record. The UI can be a bit sluggish, and it crashes extremely occasionally (about once a month, if even -- usually when it's juggling seven tasks at once), but it's a great deal, and much cheaper than a TiVo.

Re:USB2 tv tuner / DVR please!

[Ilgaz (86384)]

Buy Mac Mini, enjoy a real computer which connects to your HDTV. I would also recommend El Gato USB stuff coming with EyeTV. I plan to get a firewire blu-ray player for it when Lacie like companies figure there are people who needs "player", not "recorder".

Apple TV or Apple is not to blame, they are not selling a computer or suggest it is a computer, it is a high tech "deck" which happens to run OS X inside to do its job.

Awesome!

[DurendalMac (736637)]

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 (595695)]

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.

Re:Awesome!

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

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.

I have the feeling that Apple (probably correctly) figures that Microsoft will do that all by itself without Apple having to lift a finger.

yes offcourse they did intent that

[nietsch (112711)]

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.

Intentionally, or just not-unintentionaly?

[White Shade (57215)]

I don't think it really matters whether apple "intended" it to be easy to hack, I think it's more of the fact that every single piece of "cool" hardware with the potential for added functionality has been hacked or broken within an extremely short amount of time. Maybe rather than intending it to be easy to hack, Apple instead decided to not spend as much money on implementing all kinds of crazy protection schemes, thus allowing a higher profit margin. Which, in my mind, makes a hell of a lot of sense! :

It does seem like the norm these days is for companies to build equipment with huge amounts of power, but then they lock it down in an effort to.. protect. .. something... PSP for example; I don't know exactly what the point of locking it down was, but obviously it didn't help much. Kinda like anti-features, or un-products; you have all this potential and you lock it down. Lucky for us, apple isn't quite so far up their own butts as Sony and whatnot are, so we have a sweet new product that we can do sweet stuff on without having to go through hoops to crack it! :)

Go with the flow

[Joebert (946227)]

Did Apple intend for the Apple TV to be so easy to upgrade and hack?

I don't think it was intent to "be easy to upgrade & hack" as it was realizing how much time & resources get wasted by other companies trying to achieve somthing that's not possible.

Why not ?

[Space cowboy (13680)]

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.

Re:Why not ?

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

jo(e) public buys it so (s)he

One of the most compact examples of political correctness I think I have ever seen.

The problem with (s)he

[commodoresloat (172735)]

It's a good start, but that pronoun clearly discriminates against animals and inanimate objects that one would normally refer to as "it." Thus, for true political correctness, a better gender- and species-neutral pronoun to use is the following:

(s)h(it).

Will it stay open?

[solevita (967690)]

I think that's the important question. If all rev2 models will only run Apple signed binaries, then we'll know Apple's intentions.

It's tempting to buy one now in case they decide to toughen it all up in the future. And that's my tip for any device you may want to hack sometime in the future.

Re:Will it stay open?

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Kinda like Linksys did with their WRT54-series WAPs. Fortunately, they had to good sense to realize they were costing themselves money, and put out a hacker-friendly version. I understand that the PSP/X-Box business model of selling the hardware at a loss with the intent to recoup losses in software sales really motivates manufacturers to keep their products from being purchased for other purposes. I mean, if you buy an X-Box and put Linux on it and never buy a game, you just got yourself a cheap computer at Microsoft's expense (not that I have any particular problem with that ... it's your property, and they chose to sell it to you at a loss.) But there's no real reason for a vendor whose profit comes from hardware sales to attempt to predetermine what software runs on that hardware. Well, not in the $50 consumer-grade market anyway.

Unless, of course, you're an Apple Computer with the obvious intent of becoming the 21st century king of content distribution. You probably wouldn't want people hacking into your real-time swarming video distribution system getting movies and TV shows for free. This apparent friendliness to the hacker underground may just be a ploy to get as many of the things out there as possible, by eliminating complaints that were common to late-generation Tivos and Dish Network products. They can always lock it up later.

Time will tell.

Double whammy in Apple's favor

[localroger (258128)]

One thing people might be missing is that one of the reasons the Apple TV is so cheap is that they aren't paying any of the licensing fees that manufacturers have to in order to support other formats. Much of the cost of your DVD player, for example, goes not into the hardware but to the folks who license the formats it supports -- JPG, MP3, CD audio, and of course DVD (and some of those license also include stupid requirements like Macrovision on the output, which is ANOTHER license).

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.

Huh?? Apple doesn't own those formats!

[green pizza (159161)]

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 [apple.com], 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 [wikipedia.org].

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

Re:Double whammy in Apple's favor

[Ilgaz (86384)]

People outside OS X thinks Quicktime is just that dumb looking player. It is a framework which is installed systemwide.

If they want Ogg support, they can install the Xiph component http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 29804 [versiontracker.com] and have Ogg support all over the system. They can even drag a ogg file to Textedit window and it will "show" (!) there.

I just did to watch Novell videos and they show perfectly in my Quicktime plugin.

second project

[macTijn (717215)]

over at awkwardtv.org [awkwardtv.org] we're basically doing the same thing. wiki at http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/ [awkwardtv.org]

Re:Bound to happen

[solevita (967690)]

Linux wasn't hacked onto the PS3, Sony got it there.

And as for the PS3 being "popular"...

Re:Why don't I just buy a 360?

[-noefordeg- (697342)]

360 is UGLY!
It makes more noise than a medium sized air craft at take off. -Seriously!

Re:Why don't I just buy a 360?

[Solra Bizna (716281)]

It makes more noise than a medium sized air craft at take off.

This is a slight exaggeration. It's actually more like a small truck in neutral.

-:sigma.SB

Smaller, quieter. outputs, more dedicated to use

[SuperKendall (25149)]

So for only $100 more than the Apple TV, you get a device that is:

1) Much larger
2) Much noisier
3) Lacks HDMI output
4) has media support as an addition, not as the primary foucs of the device.

The two are almost totally seperate devices. I'll grant that if you are getting a 360 already then you have many features which are duplicated by the Apple TV. But the AppleTV is aiming at a much broader market than a game console (and this includes the PS3) can really reach I think.

Furthermore by focus, I really mean focus - as in the AppleTV is dedicated to ease in delivering internet video to your TV. Not even just any video like DVD or newer HD disc formats, but just IP video. That kind of focus usually results in a simpler system that is more appealing to people in that is does what it is meant to do very well.

Re:Nothing about installing VLC

[PygmySurfer (442860)]

This "install VLC" article discusses the installation of an SSH server and Perian, NOTHING about VLC.

Indeed, I started following the SA thread yesterday, and there was nothing about installing VLC on the device there.

The people behind the SA thread have started a Wiki [awkwardtv.org], which also deserves to be in the summary.

I'll be following this closely - I was thinking of picking up a Mini (if they ever slap a Core 2 Duo in the fucking thing), but the Apple TV would be sufficient if it'll play DivX/XviD.

Re:Obligatory linux comment

[snuf23 (182335)]

"I look at this and see more than a DVR."

I look at it and see no tuner or program guide or recording capability. I'm not sure how that equals more than a DVR. It's not even comparable to a DVR.