Hack Your Apple TV

I’m serious! Do it! The Apple TV (or “aTV” as the cool kids call it) is the greatest thing I never knew I needed. In fact, I only got one because I was sick of hooking up my PowerBook to the HDTV, therefore banishing it to an existence on the desk when I could have been using it elsewhere. And woah, I absolutely love it. I never expected to love being able to watch YouTube on my TV that much, but apparently my heart has plenty of hidden capacity. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the measly 40 GB disk that resides in the Apple TV.

Thanks to the excellent tutorials at iClarified, I am now able to attach any USB drive to the Apple TV though, which is absolutely amazing. And once you’ve hacked your box, you are also able to install the Perian codec, which you’re probably using on your Mac already, therefore allowing you to watch virtually any video file format. Let me stress that the modern hacking process of this set-top box no longer voids your warranty – it is all reversible with a simple factory restore.

Essentially, you need to compile a patchstick. You could also just buy a ready-made one, but I thought that would take some of the fun out of it and decided to make my own following the tutorials above. This can be any USB stick, but it should not be bigger than 2 GB. Sadly my Kingston Data Traveller did not work, so I reverted to another Apple product – my trusty little first gen 1 GB iPod shuffle, which worked quite beautifully.

Switch off your Apple TV, plug in the USB stick, switch on your Apple TV and it will boot from the patchstick and alter the software, therefore allowing you to establish a ssh connection to your Apple TV from your Mac. You can then install codecs, transfer files directly to the box, and install further software. I understand there is plenty of that around, such as Safari ports which will let you surf the web from your TV, but I still prefer to do that with an actual keyboard and not the slightly feeble Apple remote control which I keep displacing because it’s so small. Apparently there’s also a SNES emulator around – I might give that one a try in the near future. For now, I’m quite happy with the essentials – the external USB drive, and the Perian codecs.

I spent ages looking for the prettiest external HD enclosure. I didn’t find it, but this one’s pretty close – the Techsolo TMR-600W. It would look better if it was sitting right next to a Mac mini instead of the bigger Apple TV, but it blends in ok with the rest of the video equipment. The blue LED is a bit irritating because it is way too bright – I think I’m going to disconnect it from the power unit.

The one thing that’s missing is an actual hard drive – I tested it with my partitioned backup drive, and it works!

I feel like this is the ultimate set-top box now. Apart from YouTube and video playback, it houses my iTunes library so I no longer have to leave the PowerBook attached to the external hard drive, and the built-in photo browser which seamlessly syncs with iPhoto and Flickr is pretty spiffy, too. My only real gripe is the remote control. The alleged iPod touch update in September sounds even more alluring now.