Fun and games with Apple TV

[andrewducker]

So, I have a hacked Apple TV that I'm running XBMC on to play music/videos on.

The base functionality for the AppleTV is very shiny, but incredibly limited.  Basically, it'll play iTunes stuff, and anything that's very close to it. It won't, however, play DIVX files, because Apple don't own that.  And it certainly won't stream from random file shares - you have to use iTunes to control it.

So, step one (carried out a few months back) was to jailbreak it and install xbmc, which will play just about anything from just about anywhere.  Which took about an hour, largely because the first USB stick I used didn't work and I had to borrow one from laserboy.

However, it all works very nicely now.

Except that, for some reason, even the stuff that it supports is incredibly limited.  I wanted to watch the Google Wave demonstration video.  This is hosted on YouTube.  AppleTV supports YouTube.  Therefore, I should be able to watch the video on my TV rather than the laptop, yes?

No.

AppleTV supports YouTube videos _that are in the format that AppleTV supports_.  So I could happily add the video to my YouTube favourites as much as I like, but it wouldn't show up on the AppleTV.  It didn't say "Sorry, this video cannot be played on AppleTV."  No, apparently if you aren't Apple Compatible then you just don't exist.

So, 20 minutes of digging later I find a youtube script for xbmc, sftp that over to the right folder on the AppleTV box, run the script and *pow* - _all_ of my youtube videos are sitting there.

So now I'm typing this while the Google Wave video plays on the TV.  And very cool it is too.

The moral of the story being - proprietary solutions suck, but lovely hackers will tend to find a way of getting you what you want anyway.

Comments

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Or is the moral of the story that you're paying an Apple premium for something that doesn't just work, at least in terms of what you want it to do, and that a Linux or BSD solution would have worked just as well, and been cheaper?

[andrewducker]

You can build me a box 8" by 8" by 1" high that's totally silent, remote controlled and plays any video or music I throw at it, for £180?

I did ask at the time, and nobody could do that...

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Where would you factor in your labour costs, in identifying what to download, install and configure, and the number of hours you worked on getting it to work?

Not that a non-Apple solution would necesarily be cheaper, but the $180 omits your work in making up for Apple's shortcomings.

[andrewducker]

You think it would take me less time to build a box from scratch and install an OS onto it that's not designed to be controlled without a keyboard/mouse in a way that a remote control can manage it all? And then install exactly the same software that I installed onto the Apple TV?

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Probably not.

But how much time did the hackers who developed the software spend working around Apple's remote control interface that was presumably not designed for making it easy to get new software onto the machine? Or more generally making up for Apple's decisions to limit the functionality of their product?

It's good that the hackers did what they did to make this functionality exist, but IMHO Apple should have provided it themselves, rather than releasing a product that is intentionally limited when they could probably have made it do AVI or whatever without any great effort.

Or is there some notion that, say, AVI is an inferior format to their own, and that you thus should not be using it?

[andrewducker]

I totally agree. And I don't intend to buy an iPhone for exactly that reason - Apple don't believe in providing overall functionality for their appliances.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

It reads like you boot into Mac OS/X not XBMC which by your own account would be far better a solution.

[andrewducker]

I just looked up what the OS is on the Apple TV and was surprised to find that it is, indeed, based on 10.4. You can't tell though, because the interface is nothing like it.

It is kinda handy to have the original GUI still there though, because it has some nice features (like the trailer viewer). I'll just keep adding scripts to xbmc until it does everything I want it to.