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?"

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.

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.

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.

Why don't I just buy a 360?

[malevolentjelly]

I'm not an idiot, Apple.

For a meager $399, I could get an Xbox360 with all these features AND dvd playback. It even does Hi-def downloads, Live Arcade games, and awesome AAA titles (GTA IV, Devil May Cry 4, (possibly) MGS and FF). That's got a remote, Windows Media connectivity, etc- and is expandable to play HD-DVD, potentially Blu-Ray in the future if it "wins".

It'll even play music off your iPod. Unless you buy ALL your tv off of iTunes, why would you get this? I'd just get a 360 for this money. Both are simple to use, also.

You can probably rip those videos into WMV if you really set upon it.

Clearly, either of these devices can be modded- but I'm talking from a consumer standpoint.

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?

Re:Bound to happen

[HomelessInLaJolla]

it's bound to be hacked at some point

The assertion is that marketing departments know this now and have known this for decades. The observation is that, possibly, hardware hackers are becoming a target group of consumer. When companies design new products they may be specifically tweaking the design to allow the hardware and software infrastructure to be hacked because that will make the product more appealing to an important segment of the consumer population.

Do inquisitive hardware hacking geeks have enough financial clout to significantly affect sales numbers and therefore make themselves an important consideration in product design, testing, and manufacturing? Probably, and the probability is probably growing.

Re:Obligatory linux comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only imagine the cool things you could do with apache... samba...

Clustering...

Maybe even colocating lots of them to make very small, low overhead webhosting. Bit of a pipedream, but something to think about.

If they indeed run OS X, then a veritable plethora of opensource software is just waiting to be installed. :)

Re:Holy shit.

[default luser]

They can create a $299 box with TV-out that has a discrete graphics controller built in, but they can't put one into one SINGLE model of Mac Mini? Wow.

Not so hard to believe.

The Dothan ULV is a chip Intel sells solely for "embedded" applications these days (similar in performance and power enveloper to AMD's Geode NX). Core Duo processors in the Mac Mini cost quite a bit more.

The Apple TV also includes a 40GB 2.5" 4200 RPM hard drive, which costs a lot less than the baseline Mini's 60GB 5400 RPM drive. Pair that with the smaller base memory (256MB versus 1GB), and you can see how they can sell it for so little.

As for the discrete video, well...the GeForce 7300 Go is a slower-clocked version of the desktop 7300 LE (very cheap). It is only included because PureVideo is so much better than Intel's Clear Video (for deinterlacing and scaling), and it also accelerates video decoding. With only 64MB of slow DDR2 on a 64-bit bus, it would choke on most modern (released in the last 3 years) games.

If you wanted a solid discrete graphics solution for the Mac Mini, you'd have to go with something beefier (like the GeForce 7300 GT or Radeon x1300 Pro) plus double the memory (128MB), or it just wouldn't be worth the effort.