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Is the AppleTV Hacked a true "easy net videos on your tv" device?

B

brucku

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 19, 2003
193
20
I've been doing a ton of research and I am considering buying an ATv and hacking it with common tools or just using atvflash.com's solution.

The reason why I want an appleTV is not so much to play my itunes content on my tv, or to rent apple's pay movies... but to have a simple and effective way to play downloaded divx/xvid/avi/mkv files on my tv.

Right now anything i download plays in perian or vlc - but only 1/3 of those files work on my ps3... I'm thinking a hacked appletv will be much better?

Thoughts?
 
brucku said:
I've been doing a ton of research and I am considering buying an ATv and hacking it with common tools or just using atvflash.com's solution.

The reason why I want an appleTV is not so much to play my itunes content on my tv, or to rent apple's pay movies... but to have a simple and effective way to play downloaded divx/xvid/avi/mkv files on my tv.

Right now anything i download plays in perian or vlc - but only 1/3 of those files work on my ps3... I'm thinking a hacked appletv will be much better?

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

I love my ATV. I hacked it by hand at first, then bought ATVFlash last year, and I must say ATVFlash is so much easier! It's not an effort at all. My ATV plays pretty much any format of video. I don't have cable (gave it up when I hacked the ATV), I now only watch shows and movies on my ATV any more. I highly recommend it.
 
the atv is good for what it is but lets hope apple eventually gives it a refresh with a faster processor. the atv can really slow down. esp after its hacked.
 
If you're gonna go for it I can certainly reccomend xbmc with the crystal HD card for HD videos. If team boxee move support for crystal HD over it would be really exciting...
 
Get a WD TV Live.

I have a collection of MKV movies on a server, all shared using Samba (Windows File Sharing). You would store your movies either on a network share on your computer or on an external hard drive.

It plays almost everything... and YouTube too.
 
Did some research on the Western Digital HD Live TV unit, it has some really frustrated users writing reviews. Plenty are happy but there are some complaints that worry me. (i might pick one up to test)

Can anyone in this thread or who has not posted add some of your expirience with copying xvid, divx, 720p etc video files to the apple tv unit and compatibility with different formats?

Mostly my goal is 3rd party video players on the appleTV, not itunes sync'ed content.

(for example external HD connected by usb with divx movies and tv show episodes) - automatic IMDB searching? Thumbnails? A lot of capabilities have been demonstrated online but I'm looking for real-world exprience.

the WD reviews mentioned clicking on a video and hoping it plays... if i'm going to have this experience with the apple device also then why go WD.
 
If you want to copy movie files to your ATV, you'll have to use one of the flash solutions to install XBMC or similar. After that it works pretty well from my experience. I've watched a few DVDs and some divx movies as well.
 
While a hacked aTV is a fun toy, I would never refer to it as "easy" or elegant. I can tell you that the WAF is very low. Going in and out of Boxee and XBMC requires a software reboot of sorts. There's a delay that is fairly significant and certainly not for those who expect seamless operation (i.e. family members). Streaming video from the web is choppy and at times painful to watch because the quality is so poor. And while I haven't experimented with playing xvid content of my own, I find it far easier to enjoy media that stems from the iTunes ecosystem (from the iTunes store or Handbrake).

All that has been accomplished by the dev community is certainly
impressive. With that said, however, the aTV's hardware is simply too slow to drive the user experience I wish to have. My aTV is hacked and I enjoy streaming TED videos when I'm hangin out by my lonesome. But when the family is around and we're sitting down for a movie or enjoying music with friends, I never stray from the Apple interface.

All the best...

Nathan
 
Yea...don't plan on doing Internet streaming with the ATV, it's just far too underpowered. I haven't had any problems streaming DVDs from my network shares, though.
 
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