So I went and opened up my AppleTV and added a few components, most notably the Perian Quicktime codec pack, and ATVFiles.
It took about 20 minutes of actual work spread over about 2 hours real time (to make a backup drive image) and required only a few Torx heads, a IDE/USB transfer cable and an Intel Mac, all of which I already had.
This little bit of pseudo-hacking made my AppleTV able to do the exact thing I bought it to do when I purchased it - play all the (non-h.264) videos I have floating around on my network on my tv. This is by no means a life changing event, but it is better then converting all that video, and it’s definitely an improvement over watching it on my laptop screen.
I still can’t give you a good reason to purchase one of these apart from just wanting to have one, but I remain hopeful that the iTunes store will start selling and/or renting HD content some day soon. The bandwidth and drive space are cheap enough that I have to imagine enough people would be able to take advantage of it, and I would really like to watch the same content on my iPod, Mac, and tv, just like Apple’s ads are going on about.
Although, at this point, I’m more excited about the iPhone release, whenever that will be.
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