aTV Flash goes commercial: plug-and-play hacks for your Apple TV

Engineering souls have been hacking up the Apple TV for a good while now, but those too scared of completely ruining their box have had to sit patiently on the sidelines waiting for someone else to do their dirty work. Enter aTV Flash, a USB flash drive which enables your Apple TV (Take 2 included) to do all sorts of fancy new tricks without any fuss. Those with the drive simply plug it in and watch as new file formats become supported, UPnP media streaming opens up and Safari-based web browsing becomes a reality (among other things). Granted, the convenience will cost you $59.95, but that's the price you pay for making your life easier (and your Apple TV a little more useful).

[Via TUAW]

[The Apple @ May 23rd 2008 11:19PM]

YAY...

[Carl Vitullo @ May 23rd 2008 11:29PM]

Once again, you need to hack Apple products to make them good :P

But anyway, that is a pretty useful hack. $60 is definitely overpriced though.
Isn't the hacker community supposed to be all about free and open source?

[rogerdodger @ May 23rd 2008 11:38PM]

yeah but "open" is not "free"..didn't you know? Now you know

[ethana2 @ May 24th 2008 12:38AM]

If you're the type who'd buy a product from microsoft or Apple, you're the type to try and leech money off of. You don't care about Free there, you shouldn't care about Free in your choice of userland software that much either.
Buy what you have to to get the job done.

On the other side of the fence, our currency is bug reports, feature requests, and community support, all completely on the basis of common sense and nearly unbridled economy of scale. I report every bug I see, and I file every good idea I get on brainstorm. Because the bugs and features I interact with are specific to /me/ often times (I do weird things; I am the corner case.) , my level of interaction with the software today may help determine how well suited to my needs it is tomorrow.

[lukas88 @ May 24th 2008 12:51AM]

Wow ethana, that was baffling

[ethana2 @ May 24th 2008 1:32AM]

Sorry, the '[Arent smart people supposed to give me free stuff for proprietary platforms?]' kinda put me into one of those short lived moods...

[JJV @ May 24th 2008 1:46PM]

But i agree with Ethana its true. Just because some hackers do give out free software, doesnt mean you should expect it nor just take it woithout a donation. This is all a lot of work to do and you are sitting on your ass waiting for them to do everything for you.

[nikster @ May 25th 2008 7:08AM]

I think all the stuff on the USB stick is free.

However, if you are lazy like me, you would much rather spend $60 than spend hours upon hours installing hacks on the AppleTV.

I don't have one (yet) but I have been toying with buying an AppleTV as a sort of nice DivX player and the instructions for hacking sound rather elaborate. Not hard, just pretty time-intensive. This device makes the AppleTV much more interesting to me.

[nikster @ May 25th 2008 7:12AM]

On second thought: So these guys took a bunch of open source hacks, added some auto-start scripts, and put them on an autostarting USB flash drive. That's clever.

But how long will it take for some teenager with too much time on his hands to re-create the whole bundle from the bits and pieces floating on the internet and release it for free as a disk image so you can create your own USB stick? Hmmm.. I will hold off on a purchase for 2 weeks or so ;)

[snowwy66 @ May 23rd 2008 11:57PM]

60 bucks seems like a lot of money for something you will only use once. unless you know a lot of people that have one. or is this something that has to stay plugged in????

[timsit @ May 24th 2008 12:01AM]

The software components that the aTV Flash installs (ATVFiles, nitoTV, MediaCloud, Sapphire, Couch Surfer, Jaman Movies, video codecs (Perian, Flip4Mac, Mplayer etc...) are all freely available from the site: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/

aTV Flash bypasses all the setup hassles most normal users wouldn't want to deal with for each piece of software and puts it in a easy to package.

[Big John @ May 24th 2008 12:50PM]

Well said. The target for this most likely isn't Joe Engadget Commenter, but the more general audience.

[Claudio @ May 24th 2008 12:07AM]

Would this let someone use files already archived on an external or two?

[Big John @ May 24th 2008 12:49PM]

Yes. All this does is allow the AppleTV to make use of a broader spectrum of codecs (among other things). The files existing prior to the use of aTV Flash has nothing to do with it.

[Ed T @ May 24th 2008 12:09AM]

If it enables a real keyboard then I'd get one. Does anyone know? The aTV web site is pretty sparse on details.

[KEROLiUKAS @ May 24th 2008 12:29AM]

Only Apple...You need to pay for functionality that should have came with it in the first place.

[crash31 @ May 24th 2008 12:47AM]

HAHA THATS FUNNY!!

Only Apple...Are you serious?? Like are you being for real??? I dont even know if i should be responding to this...oh well.

[ethana2 @ May 24th 2008 12:48AM]

Tell me, when you install Windows, is it ready for the road? Good to go? Complete? Useful out of the box?
Not really, no.
You pay for anti viruses when an good OS doesn't get them in the first place.
You likely, if you're like me, download and install a bunch of things to make it full featured.
OSX comes with a decent browser. It comes with a webcam utility. It doesn't get viruses. ..stuff like that-- while windows does not.
It's not 'Only Apple'.
(I don't know if it comes with a bittorent client like transmission, but it's probably a ton closer to complete than windows is regardless)

[ethana2 @ May 24th 2008 1:21AM]

uggh, my grammar was horrible, I was trying to beat crash31 to it ;)

[netdroid9 @ May 24th 2008 2:47AM]

"Tell me, when you install Windows, is it ready for the road? Good to go? Complete? Useful out of the box?
Not really, no."

I would tend to disagree. Immediately after installation, Windows let's you go online and download what you need. Just like OSX, just like Linux. If you buy it with Office, you get a word processor, spreadsheet program, and all kinds of other stuff. Office is sorta like the iLife package IMO, just targeted to a different audience (just like Windows is targeted to a different audience to Mac OS X. How many workstations have you seen running OSX?)

"You pay for anti viruses when an good OS doesn't get them in the first place."

After spending all of a year without an anti-virus scanner, then installing one and running it, I must say this: With auto-update enabled, a decent spam-filter and a router with builtin firewall (such as, well, pretty much every ADSL router out there), Windows just doesn't get viruses. If you run with no firewall, no updates, and no protection of any kind, of course you're screwed. Luckily, MS wised up a long time ago and started including internet security inside the OS, so anti-virus has become almost redundant for most people.

"You likely, if you're like me, download and install a bunch of things to make it full featured."

Same with any OS. Linux doesn't come with everything I want preinstalled, nor does OSX. I couldn't stand running *any* operating system out of the box for a long period of time.

"OSX comes with a decent browser. It comes with a webcam utility. It doesn't get viruses. ..stuff like that-- while windows does not."

Internet Explorer 6 wasn't that bad after SP2, and IE7 on Vista is much more awesome. That said, all the stock browsers from Apple and MS suck IMO, Firefox and Opera FTW.

"It's not 'Only Apple'."

I agree, but targetting windows based on old arguments is silly.

[conor @ May 24th 2008 10:10AM]

Opera Firefox or Camino are the only browsers i will ever use.

[ThreeDee912 @ May 24th 2008 4:49PM]

Wow ethena, And I thought I was a Apple fanboy... You are trying waayyy too hard.

[caleb @ May 24th 2008 9:00PM]

"Opera Firefox or Camino are the only browsers i will ever use."

Careful...I remember a time when I said the very same thing about Netscape.

[booticon @ May 24th 2008 12:40AM]

The argument that you need to hack Apple products to make them useful is horseshit. Yes, the features would be cool, but do you really expect Apple to bundle, for example, an *emulator* into AppleTV?

[aschmack @ May 24th 2008 1:51AM]

Nobody is saying that; more along the lines of we shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to install said emulators.

[rawhead @ May 24th 2008 3:48AM]

@ aschmack

"we shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to install said emulators"

Of course you should. Like many single-use appliances, the AppleTV hardware is heavily subsidized by the original manufacturer (that would be Apple), who wish to make money off of the content that is meant to be used on the said appliance. That, in this context, would be everything you can buy at the iTunes store.

So, if there is software that makes the appliance useful for other things, so that people would buy it but not the content, Apple loses money for every hardware it sells. So hell yeah, they're going to go the measure to make sure it's hard/impossible (of course, nothing is impossible) to do that.

Do you not have to jump through hoops to get emulators working on a PSP? A DS? X-Box 360, Wii, or PS3? Those are the appliances you should be comparing the Apple TV to, not Macs or PCs.

I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing; it's not an issue of ethics.

[lowonthe456 @ May 24th 2008 1:00AM]

i think its a good deal. i would think with safari loaded that a bt keyboard would be supported, but i don't know. if it does i'd plunk 60 for it. if it could enable an external drive, i'd pay 100 easy. my only hold up on the atv is the hard drive. i want at least 250gb. sounds like i need to investigate this further.

[doctorSpoc @ May 24th 2008 8:54AM]

you should definitely investigate it further... since you can stream (rather than sync) to the appleTV, it means that you don't really need storage on the device at all. making a hack to do this kind of useless.

you can just add externals to your computer and store as much as you'd like... i have almost 1TB of movies and music that i stream to my appleTV.. when you stream they just show up in the list just as if they were physically on the appleTV so in the use case there is really no difference.

[Eric Hobbs @ May 24th 2008 1:34AM]

You can order Pizza on it!!! That's totally worth $60!!!

[rawhead @ May 24th 2008 3:54AM]

You keep telling yourself that, while the market makes the actual decision. Not saying Apple TV is a success; just that your opinion means jack shit.

[Kizorblade @ May 24th 2008 4:06AM]

"no segment of society needs such a thing"

Haha. That's why there's other stuff like the Apple TV right? Because nobody buys them?

Dumbshit. Once you realize that there is a world outside your room, then come back.

[pdutta @ May 24th 2008 8:38AM]

As someone that is in the process of converting every DVD I own into aTV format, I'm excited at this news. One question...will this let me play .MKV files natively? I think Perian is supposed to do this but AckwardTV lists it's supports as "not very usable".

[Big John @ May 24th 2008 12:55PM]

I don't have an AppleTV, however I have Perian and various MKV files. Mostly 720p / 1080p stuff in x264 contained in MKV.

When I load one of these files via Front Row, I usually pause the movie instantly and let it pre-load a bit (maybe 10-15 seconds). After resuming, I have little to no issues with grabled audio or video. It'll get stuck occasionally but I attribute this more to my lack of a power machine and RAM more than anything (also, pulling from a USB drive).

If I load the same movie in QuickTime (outside of Front Row), I have to let the entire movie pre-load (can take several minutes for a feature-length film). If I try to play it before it can finish pre-loading, I end up with loud audio hiccups every 5-20 seconds at a random interval. The video looks fine but the movie is unwatchable due to the audio issue. I can't just pause it and let it finish loading either; starting over is the only way to fix it.

I don't know why there is a difference. Perian is a QuickTime component and Front Row (as well as the AppleTV) both use QuickTime to render content. I suppose, based off my above experiences, I would say that the AppleTV shouldn't have large issues playing those files.

[Niklas @ May 26th 2008 4:30PM]

Big John,
have you installed Perian 1.1 on your Mac? it should fix the mkv loading issue, it did so for me.

[Big John @ May 24th 2008 12:51PM]

I'm extremely glad that you, Kev50273, don't represent 100% of the consumer market.

[YoMomma @ May 24th 2008 1:39PM]

wow this might be useful for the 10 people that bought the Apple TV.

[JJV @ May 24th 2008 1:50PM]

I'm glad that he doesnt even represent 1% of the consumer market.

[Mark @ May 25th 2008 3:14PM]

What's an apple tv?

[Aaron @ May 25th 2008 9:02PM]

I felt empowered by this article today, made a Patchstick 2.0.2, and enabled SSH on my AppleTV.

Then I added the requisite CODECs for DivX, XviD, etc., and it worked great.

There are some caveats: I fed it a poorly-encoded MKV file and it crashed the entire AppleTV. (Had to reboot the box.) It also doesn't have the horsepower to decode MPEG2 streams at 720p or 1080i because it doesn't use the H.264 hardware acceleration that MP4 files use.

Overall, I see why Apple limited the formats to a small amount. Files on the Internet are many times poorly encoded and corrupted, causing major problems. I see it on VLC or MPlayer too.

By requiring a MP4 file format from Apple (or iSqueeze or VisualHub or Handbrake, etc.), they limit the potential problems the AppleTV will have. Yes, it's a pain in the ass to transcode videos, but at least I know WHY they did it now.

[Dignan17 @ May 27th 2008 7:43PM]

Greetings, Aaron!

I'd love to try a little hacking of my Apple TV, so where should I start? I don't need the majority of the stuff in the aTV device, just primarily the expanded video codecs.

Also, I only partially disagree with you on the limited codec support out of the box. Sure, it's nearly impossible for Apple to accommodate all the crazy amount of codecs that exist out there, but it would be pretty easy to support a large number of them. My #1 (and pretty much only) complaint about the Apple TV is the limited codec support. My #2 complaint (oops, I lied), is that the Apple TV doesn't even support its one codec very well. I have tried time and time again to convert videos to the appropriate mp4 format, but I can't seem to get the correct settings. Even if I try to set the conversion to the specs laid out on the Apple TV product page on Apple.com, it still ends up not being supported by the Apple TV. This only results in extreme frustration, and leads me to believe that Jobs doesn't even WANT people to put anything on the Apple TV other than stuff you have to buy.

So what would your recommendations be on converting to the Apple TV-supported format (using Windows)?

[takemetoyourtoaster @ May 26th 2008 9:09PM]

here is my question:
why not do XBMC?
for 60 bucks (price of said flash drive) you could have a full blown, better media center, I just got it for OS X and it is absolutely mind blowing! also what I realized is; get this: I can use my voice, a wiimote, a tv remote control, a xbox 360 remote control, and the keyboard to control my media center! if you have the money, or you already have a mac mini, just skip this and install OS X XBMC, or, buy a hacked xbox online, or do it yourself like I said before, besides for the mac mini, it will be cheaper and better than an apple tv

[Rick @ May 27th 2008 6:31PM]

I am one of those peopl who want the functionality but don't want to spend time trying to install all of these codecs and screw something up. I'll look into the awkwardtv site again because the $60 is a bit excessive, but I might take the plunge.

[Asher @ May 27th 2008 9:29PM]

Anyone pick one of these up yet?

[mike @ May 28th 2008 1:07AM]

I just did a Factory Restore on my AppleTV after trying desperately to get aTV Flash to work as advertised.

The site has some pretty serious omissions. This is a collection of disparate shareware apps on a flash drive. Many require additional downloads and Terminal skills. There is almost no documentation included and no online documentation on the Apple Core site. You will be directed to various wikis on each app's developer pages.

A few of aTV's/AppleCore's shortcomings:

- You must perform a Factory Restore and update before installing aTV. Yup, you have to reinstall all of your media files (100GB for me). This would be forgivable if everything else worked.
- Flash is installed, but requires copying OS 10.4 files from a Tiger install DVD or an Intel Mac running 10.4. Even then, Couch Surfer fails to display Flash and freezes AppleTV anytime it encounters Flash Video.
- There are no previews for movies in nitoTV, Sapphire or Files unless they are commercial movies
- There are references to features that are not documented ("Play DVD files WITHOUT converting them", "DVD Import Location").
- Misleading statements about it's ease of use ("just drag and drop your media files onto the Apple TV", this required an SFTP client; "Sync, organize and watch non-iTunes video files", there is no "sync" capability... that implies automated, two way communication rather than SFTP).

This package is for tinkerers only. Ironically, it's marketed as a plug and play solution ("The software installs automatically, and no modification or coding is required."). Anybody that is willing to put this kind of time into tweaking their AppleTV can download the apps and use a spare flash drive to install them. You're going to be visiting those site anyways to read the documentation.

The support staff is polite and timely in their responses. Unfortunately, they couldn't give me my time back.

[CiscoTM @ Jun 2nd 2008 8:56AM]

Try www.ATV4Windows.com they have a very similar piece of software!