Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple TV Taken Apart

SiliconAddict said:
Hmmmm $300...seems more then a little high considering the design being a pretty vanilla setup. And please don't throw out R&D. Forget a killing. Apple must be making a genocide on each system.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong I'd prefer it to be half the price but it's close to comparable in price to the D-Link HD streamer ( at least in the UK) and by all accounts that sucks the big one in a whole load of ways and I believe has no Hard Drive in it.......I don't think Apple have 'overloaded' the price..$100 lower would be very nice and it'll probably come in 6 months time...

but let's get down to the nitty gritty here - if you have a mac and an LCD TV and you actually understand what the product achieves your going to want one of these, and unless your hard up there is no compellingly good reason not to buy one is there ?

I'ts a sweet little product that does exactly what it say's on the tin.
 
Diode said:
People are already getting 5.1 output on handbreak's forum. Its a developer release so you need to svn and compile the code. They are using a 6 channel AAC audio format.
Click to expand...

Here and you got me all excited. I checked the handbrake forums, and while the AppleTV can play back AAC 5.1 encoded audio, it just sends it to the receiver as matrix stereo. It doesn't actually play back in discrete 5.1.
 
So why can't Apple stick a 7300 in the Macbook? Certainly price, heat and power consumption aren't an issue. What's their excuse?
 
From the FAQ, nVidia states that the video processors are programmable, will we see 1080p in a future update?

From the nVidia FAQ site:

Q: What is in the video processor?
We’ve taken PureVideo to the next level by adding support for some new algorithms with GeForce Go 7-series. With those new algorithms, we now support de-interlacing with HD resolutions up to 1080i. In addition, we’ve added support for inverse 2:2 pull-down. The video processors are programmable, so as new video formats come out we will be able to support them through driver updates. In addition, GeForce Go 7300 supports WMV HD decode acceleration that can offload video decoding from the CPU onto the GPU, reducing CPU utilization by about 40 percent.
Click to expand...

http://www.nvidia.com/page/go_7300_faq.html

They also claim hardware support for the other formats from their PureVideo marketing page:

Bringing the High-Definition Home Theater Experience to Your PC

Today’s consumers demand a high-definition (HD) home theater experience on their PC. They want superb picture clarity, stutter-free playback and multiple display connectivity options. The best way to achieve this is with NVIDIA® PureVideo™ technology.

Watch videos on your desktop PC, notebook PC, or HDTV without the annoying artifacts and imperfections of traditional PC-based video solutions. NVIDIA PureVideo technology is the combination of a dedicated video processing core and software that delivers ultra-smooth, high-definition H.264, WMV, and MPEG-2 movies with minimal CPU utilization and low power consumption. And the high-precision subpixel processing enables videos to be scaled to any size, so that even small videos look like they were recorded in high-resolution.
Click to expand...

http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo.html
 
Leoff said:
Yes, it is cool. Yes, I wouldn't mind having one. And yes, I have been sucked into all the posts so far.

But I mean come ON. "Apple TV Taken Apart." "Apple TV Instructions" "Apple TV Unboxing."

What comes next? "Apple TV is plugged in." "Apple TV placement on or near a TV set." "Apple TV used as a coaster." "Apple TV may open gateways to alternate dimensions."
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. I found it quite obnoxious that there were this many articles / posts regarding the arrival of the Apple TV in someone's home. Could someone please condense things like this in the future to ONE (1) article / post and just use the update feature. There is no need to spam the site with that much iTV related stuff. Way overboard. I'll probably try to avoid the site as best I can when new products are released if this is the new prescient.
 
dr_lha said:
I was just thinking the same thing. I assume this is because the AppleTV's CPU is not a powerhouse, like the MacBooks C2D, so needs all the help it can get decoding video. Still, seems a shame that Apple can stick a dedicated chip in this thing but not the MacBook/mini.
Click to expand...

Its about a year newer too.

I wonder what the NEXT MacBook will have?

Rocketman
 
ajonessn said:
It's not a 3.5" HDD. It's only a 2.5" HDD. You can see that in this photo. I would suspect that simply taking out the drive, and hooking it up to an external firewire PATA would allow you to clone the disc to a larger drive, thus allowing you to upgrade the storage.
Click to expand...

I can imagine the next issue of Mac User or Mac World magazines now ... "How to hack your ApleTV" :)
 
andyblac said:
i have a 160gb drive on order it should arrive monday as should my Apple TV, i'll let you know how i get on
Click to expand...

That's very brave of you ... thanks. I guess worst case you can just put the original back. Are you going to clone the original? I just hope as someone suggested it isn't ZFS being used ahead of Leopard in which case you might hit a problem. Good luck ... and fingers crossed. I need at least 160 GB for my full library.
 
Runs OS X

I hooked the hard drive from my apple tv to my macbook through a usb adapter, and it does infact have a cut down version of os x. The interesting part is my macbook tried to boot off the drive, it got as far as the apple logo the mactv gives you on boot up and then froze. The hdd is broken up into 3 partitions, one 400mb unknown partition, 1 900mb called "OSBoot" that as the name says, has the os on it. and the remaining space of the drive is called "Media" and has the music, videos, etc on it. Using Disk Copy I was able to copy OSBoot and Media to a 100gb laptop drive. I was not able to copy the 400mb unkown partition over. The apple TV DID BOOT with the 100gb drive and worked, but if you reset the device it wont boot again. I have a feeling there is something in that 400mb partition that is somewhat important. If I reimage the OSBoot it would work again. In iTunes the appletv shows as having roughly 90gb of available space when emtpy.
A hard drive upgrade is possible, but I need to copy that 400mb partition for it to work right.
 
Digitalclips said:
That's very brave of you ... thanks. I guess worst case you can just put the original back. Are you going to clone the original? I just hope as someone suggested it isn't ZFS being used ahead of Leopard in which case you might hit a problem. Good luck ... and fingers crossed. I need at least 160 GB for my full library.
Click to expand...

yup, that's my plan, going to use Apple's Disk Utility app to create a disk image. as i'm hoping, as people are stating that it has a mini osx on the HD, should then be-able to use scan for restore to get the disk image ready to restore it to the new drive. that's my idea anyway.

my backup plan is, i read somewhere that a guy had a problem with his AppleTV booting up, he was told by an apple engineer that the HD has 2 partitions on it, 1 for the main drive, the other has a disk image use for a HD recover. the AppleTV try to boot 5 times, if that fails it tries to restore from the disk image. so if my cloned HD does not boot then i'm hoping the AppleTV will just reload the boot partition with the available image.
 
I am thinking the 400mb partition that disk copy wouldnt touch was the restore partition, after copying the 2 partitions and trying to revert to factory defaults, it would just refresh the menu when the option was selected.
 
I did try disk utility on the drive itself. It did make an image of the whole drive but disk utility could not restore from the image.
 
ill take a look for the folder tonight. I did not try the scan and restore option. Must have slipped my mind at 2 AM lol
 
moldymac said:
ill take a look for the folder tonight. I did not try the scan and restore option. Must have slipped my mind at 2 AM lol
Click to expand...

cheers, fingers crossed for that quicktime folder we may just able to add our own codecs :D, which might shut all those "AppleTV is useless because it does not have AVI support" people up. :)
 
I had the apple tv's image I made on my macbook and took a look. There is a quicktime folder in system/library folder, and theres a bunch of files in it
 
moldymac said:
I had the apple tv's image I made on my macbook and took a look. There is a quicktime folder in system/library folder, and theres a bunch of files in it
Click to expand...

like these:

QuickTimeMPEG2.component
QuickTimeIIDCDigitizer.component
QuickTimeMPEG.component
QuickTimeH264.component
QuickTime3GPP.component
ApplePixletVideo.component
QuickTimeUSBVDCDigitizer.component
QuickTimeVR.component
QuickTimeStreaming.component
QuickTimeMPEG4.component
QuartzComposer.component
QuickTime Updater
QuickTimeFireWireDV.component
QuickTimeComponents.component
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back