David Emery OnlineSo so-so?
26 March 2007
Last week the Apple TV, Apple’s first foray into the living room, finally shipped. My first opinion was, I’ll be honest, a bit lukewarm.
Yes, it’s an Apple product so, yes it looks nice.
Ditto for the user interface, although that being said it’s nothing special (certainly no iPhone).
Ditto for the iTunes and iLife integration.
So far, so so-so.
My current home setup is an old 867mhz 12” PowerBook (still the best machine Apple has ever made) hooked up to my TV, which I then VNC into to play videos on using VLC. This just about services, as I’ve – like most of the UK – don’t have an HD TV and have no real plans to get one. The second I start to want to play anything above 640×480 I’m probably going to hit the upper limits of my decoding power.
So, in theory an Apple TV sounds like a great solution to the problem; as soon as I start to want to play HD content – which is what I guess Apple will start selling over here when they finally get round to it – it becomes a whole bunch more useful.
Except for the fact that none of the video I have – which is almost all divx/xvid .avi’s – will play on it.
Ok.
Fine.
How about I use it to listen to music on? In theory, that sounds great – I’ve got all my music in iTunes, and it’s all got album art so will look super swanky on my TV.
Except that – for some unknown reason – Apple decided to leave the killer feature of the iPod, the one that made the interface work where know-one else’s did, off the remote. I am of course talking about the Click Wheel, without which makes the Apple TVs interface difficult to use with music libraries of any real size.
So, we’re done here – right? The Apple TV goes down as another small misstep in Apple history, along with the Cube and iTunes for Motorolla phones.
Not so fast.
The most interesting thing about the Apple TV is what it is, and hence what it runs. The Apple TV is basically a cut down Mac Mini, with a slower CPU, better graphics chip (better then the MacBook’s!) and better wireless. Which leads straight through to what it runs:
Mac OS X.
10.4.7, to be exact.
The folks at the Something Awful forums have done all the digging, but to all extents and purposes the Apple TV runs a custom install of Mac OS X, with the Finder replaced by the FrontRow software. By itself, this wouldn’t be too interesting, but this means – with a little bit of elbow grease – you can set up remote access to the Apple TV, which then means you can start installing things.
Anything. Any Mac program will run on the Apple TV.
Which includes for example, Firefox, which would make a great YouTube viewer for your TV. It also includes Perian, which is a Quicktime component which lets Quicktime play all sorts of different file formats, and hence lets the Apple TV play all those videos I was talking about earlier.
It also includes games, which would probably run quite nicely with the Nvidia graphics card contained inside – for reference, the Apple TV is almost certainly faster then the Nintendo Wii. Heck, you could probably get the Wii controller working with it without a huge amount of problems.
So, while these hacks aren’t ready for the mainstream yet – they require opening the box and taking out the hard drive, which isn’t that hard but beyond most people – they certainly indicated that the Apple TV may well have a more interesting life then initial reports would suggest.