As described on http://forums.somethingawful.com/ the Apple TV launched a week ago has been successfully hacked to play xvid and WMV through the following process:
- Open it up (4 screws on the bottom, small Torx bit)
- Put the 2.5″ drive into a USB enclosure or whatever you want
- Mount the HFS filesystem
- Install Perian in /Library/Quicktime (as you normally would)
- Install Dropbear (or enable SSH if you know how… we gave up and used Dropbear)
- Add a startup script to disable the firewall or open up the ports you need for SSH
- Put the drive back in and boot it, ssh login as frontrow, password frontrow (or add an ssh key for yourself)
- Use a reference movie (use QT Pro to save a reference movie) to bootstrap your xvid file
Apparently the Apple TV is a trimmed down version of OS X that can run intel based OS X Perian multimedia plugin and Dropbear. The question is… would it be able to run the Joost intel Mac client? Quite possibly!
So if one want to donate me an Apple TV I will be more than happy to hack it to run Joost!
Happy hacking!
That would be a great, you could call it Apple Joos(t)
Sorry I couldn’t resist
David
There is actually a rumor running around about Apple possibly thinking about buying Joost… but I doubt it is actually true…
That would be a pretty sweet hack
[...] replacement internal drives are already available (see IResQ). The box has also been hacked to play xvid and WMV files, if you take a screwdriver to it and alter the contents of the internal hard drive. Joost (still in [...]