Apple TV: Oh So Hackable

The Apple TV has been in the hands of customers for just about two weeks, and man it’s been great! What I’m most interested in is people who are extending the abilities of the Apple TV to better suit their lives, because let’s face it, who has all of their video content stored in the Apple TV compatible formats? Certainly not me. Progress from Apple TV hackers wasted no time in making it’s way to the internet. The first bits of progress came in a couple days after the Apple TV had started shipping. Engadget let us know how they went about upgrading the internal hard drive in their own Apple TV. The big news was when two guys at the SomethingAwful (wiki) forums got the Quicktime plugin Perian installed, thus xvid playback was then possible.

As it turns out, the Apple TV is capable of running full blown Mac OS X Tiger, the same Mac OS X that we all know and love. That’s great, but there are obvious limitations to this computer, the biggest, it has 256MB of RAM built-in with no RAM slot to add more. I’m not a fan of modern Mac OS X systems with only 512MB of RAM, so this 256MB RAM limitation means that this computer is best suited for dedicated appliance computing.

Appliance computing like say video streaming to your TV over your network, that one is obvious, right? How about an Apple TV running Asterisk as the brains of your company’s PBX phone system? Yea, I didn’t see that one coming either, but I suppose it makes sense, as that was one of the first dedicated appliance installations for the PowerPC Mac mini when it was first released over 2 years ago.

After following all of this, it sure seems like Apple did not go very far to protect this new product from being tampered with. Sure they had to physically open the case and take out the hard drive, but from there it was not very difficult to mount the filesystem. Around then they realized that this thing is running our new friend, OS X. Now that all this has been done, there is a good chance that more work will be done to simplify the steps needed to apply these hacks and perhaps even automate the installation process. Hopefully allowing people to mod their Apple TV without opening the case.