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Adding Format Support

Meanwhile, an entire community of Apple TV owners/hackers is busy trying to clear perhaps the highest hurdle of all: support for other video/audio formats. The largest such gathering appears to be an ever-growing forums thread over on Something Awful documenting these efforts. As it turns out, given that the Apple TV is running a version of Mac OS X (10.4.7, as mentioned above and documented in that Something Awful thread), adding support for other formats isn't difficult.

The Apple TV software uses QuickTime for handling media, so if you remove the Apple TV's hard drive and connect it to a Mac--for example, by using an external hard-drive enclosure or a connector such as Newer's Universal Drive Adapter--you can navigate directly to the /Library/QuickTime folder on the Apple TV drive and install third-party plug-ins such as Perian. (Perian adds support for formats such as DivX, FLV, AVI, XviD, and many others.) You can also install Flip4Mac's Windows Media Components for QuickTime on the Apple TV drive to add support for WMV content.

Alas, even if you perform the above procedures, you won't suddenly be able to view files in these new formats on your Apple TV. Just because the Apple TV supports other formats after such modifications doesn't mean iTunes will sync media using those formats to the Apple TV. You see, iTunes is still the gatekeeper of Apple TV content, and it still thinks the Apple TV is limited to its stock format support.

The smart folks over on Something Awful and Awkward have figured out ways around this road block, but they aren't pretty: Basically, you need to create QuickTime reference movies--ones that reference the actual unsupported video files--and trick iTunes into syncing those to the Apple TV; copy the actual media files onto the Apple TV's hard drive (a process that itself involves enabling or installing your own SSH service and configuring the Apple TV's firewall); and then make sure those reference movies link to the correct locations of the manually-transferred media files. (You could also theoretically keep the actual media files somewhere on the network and configure the reference movies to access them over the network, but that's even more complicated.)

If this all sounds crazy geeky, that's because it is. But the fact that it can apparently be done means that it won't be too long before some clever developer creates an application that automates the process for you. (Some people have already figured out how--and explained the process in detail--to replace the Apple TV's own Front Row-like interface with the CenterStage media-center software, which lets you play unsupported video that you manually copy to the Apple TV's hard drive.)

Other tricks

Interested in other tricks and hacks? How about running the Apple TV software on a MacBook? Or enabling Remote Desktop/VNC on your Apple TV? Or running Apache (the open-source Web server used by Mac OS X for Personal Web Sharing)? These are just a few of the things people are doing...because they can.

We've already tinkered with displaying Keynote and PowerPoint presentations through Apple TV and plan on trying out some of these other hacks ourselves--as well as looking into a few new ones--in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

More on the Way

Clearly, the Apple TV isn't as "limited"--at least not by hardware--as many people originally feared. The question now is whether Apple will embrace, or at least turn a blind eye to, this hacking community, or spoil the fun like Sony does with its PSP (each new software update for the PSP breaks "homebrew" software and features). With any luck, the Apple TV will become a favorite toy of hackers as well as an ever-improving product, thanks to software updates from Apple that implement some of the most-requested features, for the rest of us.