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Boxee Offers Major New Features to Apple TV Owners

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Apr 12, 2001
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Scott Davilla has released a method to (relatively) easily install Boxee onto your existing Apple TV. The process involves using the atvusb-creator software (Intel Mac only) to create a bootable USB drive which you plug into your Apple TV. That bootloader will subsequently patch your Apple TV to install the Boxee interface as a separate menu option in addition to the existing Apple TV functionality.

Boxee is a free personal media center that offers an alternative and flexible media browser for several platforms. Boxee originated from the XBox Media Center project but has added social networking features and multiple platform support, now including the Apple TV. CNet took an early look at the software back in June and thought it was going to be the "next big thing" in media center software.
So what does Boxee do? If you've ever used Joost, it's somewhat similar. You can plug in feeds of Web videos and browse through them, complete with video thumbnails and meta data. What makes it different is that it taps into your local media like videos, photos, and music you have saved on your hard drive. Both layers of media (online and offline) are wrapped up together with a social network of other Boxee users, so if you like something you're watching you can recommend it to friends.
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While the social networking features are nice, Apple TV owners will also enjoy the ability to browse media on their compuetrs, across a network, or on the Internet and playback a wide variety of video/audio formats including hard-drive saved DVD video with menu support. iTunes protected content, of course, is not available under Boxee, but those can still be played with the original Apple TV menu options which are preserved.

A demo video shows off the interface for Boxee. Boxee remains in alpha testing, so users should proceed with caution. At present Boxee is invite-only but users can easily apply and we've been assured that they will try to issue invites "as quickly as possible". Users can also invite other users and we ask that readers focus invite requests in this thread rather than cluttering up the article discussion thread.

Article Link
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/10/01/boxee-offers-major-new-features-to-apple-tv-owners/
Wow maybe I will get an appleTV rather than building a HTPC. Seems pretty cool and I love XBMC on my xbox.
 
I wants it!!! What happens when I break my apple tv entirely though? x_x do I have to find like an apple tv iso and oh my I don't even want to know. :x
 
That's pretty sweet. I'm still on the 1.x software though. I need a new TV with more inputs so I don't need to run the component kext hack.
 
a few more notes:

- historically, Apple's AppleTV software updates have been "ok" with these hacks but you can never know
- you can restore to factory default settings if something messes up. (how to)

arn
 
Very interesting indeed...I love my Apple TV but I wonder if Apple will find some way to break this.
 
Ahh, that is one good looking project. Definitely something I'll put on my AppleTV down the road when it's finalized. And like Arn said, you can easily restore it without any real software hacks, just the remote (hold down "-" button and Menu and click restore).
 
iphonewiz said:
Very interesting indeed...I love my Apple TV but I wonder if Apple will find some way to break this.
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The only way I see Apple countering this is if they offer something in a future firmware release that is worth upgrading. Really, the only thing I can see is if they allowed a VLC codecs compatibility on the AppleTV, which of course requires upgrading to iTunes 9 or something drastic, and even then this project seems to have taken care of that already, plus more. Basically, it's unlikely that Apple will be able to do much (similar to how people decide whether or not to jailbreak their iPhones after a new firmware release)
 
wonder if it will play dixv avi files. the current method of getting to play natively is too in depth for me. don't suggest converting the file either I want native playback baby! :p
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

Well I'll be! News on the Apple TV!
 
bennyboi said:
wonder if it will play dixv avi files. the current method of getting to play natively is too in depth for me. don't suggest converting the file either I want native playback baby! :p
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XBMC will handle a load of formats, including divx, my question would be is the apple tv beefy enough to support the 720p x264 content that is avaliable on the internet. If so, this is very interesting to me as an upgrade to my xbox.
 
xbmc is great on my xbox. This gives me a good reason to buy an appletv. I am going to wait until mwsf to buy an appletv. Hopefully this software will be mature by then.
 
UndisclosedP said:
XBMC will handle a load of formats, including divx, my question would be is the apple tv beefy enough to support the 720p x264 content that is avaliable on the internet. If so, this is very interesting to me as an upgrade to my xbox.
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+1. I've been thinking about the Mini for this, but if the AppleTV can run 720p x264 I'll maybe give it a try.

Otherwise I'll get the Mini in a couple of months - hopefully an upgraded one.
 
bolen said:
+1. I've been thinking about the Mini for this, but if the AppleTV can run 720p x264 I'll maybe give it a try.

Otherwise I'll get the Mini in a couple of months - hopefully an upgraded one.
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Ditto, but the WAF of an ATV is much higher than a mini. So would love to be able to use it, anyone got a success story of 720p scene mkv's on the ATV?
 
this may seem weird but why when you use a computer that already dose all of this. A nice idea but seems strange to me then again i do not own an apple tv
 
This may sound dumb, but is there a simple (as in USB drive easy) method to force the :apple:TV in a 4:3 aspect ratio? (with subsequent letterboxing of 16:9 content and non-pillarboxing of 4:3 content)

I have an old 36" CRT TV which has component inputs and can do 480p (also 1080i but it flickers too much for my taste), but it doesn't have any "aspect ratio" setting.
 
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