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But, why is everyone expecting that the jailbreaking/app development community will take off in the same way as with the iPhone just because this runs iOS?

Cause we all wanna install apps on it and play it at Retina display res on a big screen, duh.
 
Dude the new Apple TV is already popular, where have you been? Its pretty much sold out at all the apple stores. They probably sold about 300k of these already...maybe even more. Plus it is the cheapest IOS device that apple makes!

Heck the cheapest 1GHZ computer you can buy!

Yep. And how many 1GHz computers do you know that can decode high quality flash video smoothly? My brand new 1.6 GHz atom can barely do it. Do you think the A4 will be any better?

I see all these people getting excited over the prospects of this bringing all these new web based video sources to their ATV. The same thing happened with the original ATV. I don't think the hardware will be able to handle it. But I'll be happy if thats wrong.

I guess it's the price point alone that will drive it's popularity. Save for Netflix, this product is identical to the original ATV. Apple's philosophy with the ATV has been to design it with the bare minimum specs, to keep it cheep and cool, and then limit the content to only very specific formats that will work. This thing isn't going to handle everything that you throw at it.
 
Plus it is the cheapest IOS device that apple makes!

Why is being a cheep iOS device a selling point? Who cares what operating system it runs? Does it look like iOS? Does it run apps? Does it offer any of the functionality that people associate with the other iOS devices? Why would your average person say, ouuuu cheep device that has the same backbone operating system as my iPhone, that creates the potential for some interesting jailbreaking opportunities. Very few people think like that. People will buy this because it's cheep, and it plays Netflix and iTunes videos. Mostly because it's the same price as a Netflix ROKU.
 
all i want to be able to do is access .avi files from an external hard drive.
 
well how long did that take them, i bet they could of done it faster LOL
that is awesome cant wait till i get one it will be jail broken when the time comes
 
So sure apps are coming!

So, if this isn't proof that Apple will be giving us TV apps, then i'll happily eat my delicious iPad:
http://www.google.com/tv/

There is no way Steve will be outdone by his favorite frenemy! The Google Tv box will run the android ios, with access to thousands of apps from its market.

If you remember his Keynote address, he mentioned that the device was not meant to store media, but to stream it, so why else would the Apple Tv be running an actual ios and sport that 8 G's of extra storage space?:rolleyes:
 
Yep. And how many 1GHz computers do you know that can decode high quality flash video smoothly? My brand new 1.6 GHz atom can barely do it. Do you think the A4 will be any better?

Does it use a coprocessor for the heavy-duty decoding? I thought Flash and Apple video both were variants of mp4 video.
 
I thought Flash and Apple video both were variants of mp4 video.

Flash supports a number of video container/codec formats. One of these is a vanilla MP4 file (if you rename the .FLV or .F4V file to .MP4 - double click and Windows Media Player will play it with native Win7 video support without any Flash components installed on the system). Other .FLV files use different container/codec formats, and need the Flash software or downloadable DirectShow/VfW codecs to play.

I have no idea what you mean by "Apple video" - Apple supports many different container/codec formats, and has supported many more. One of those, of course, is support for a vanilla MP4 file.
 
"PwnageTool"
I find the whole subculture of jailbreakers kind of sad. Imagine sitting in your basement using your valuable time to hack into a 99 dollar gizmo, and when done, having exactly nothing.

If you really think the hackers, in the end, have "exactly nothing" - you totally don't get it.

I have no problems with people hacking the devices - it can end up providing the larger community with better software. But even if it doesn't - so what? It's no different than doing a crossword puzzle, tinkering with your car, or being into ham radio.

I do get tired of the "pwn" meme though. Or, should I say, 'I dp get tired pf the "pwn" meme thpugh'.
 
"PwnageTool"
I find the whole subculture of jailbreakers kind of sad. Imagine sitting in your basement using your valuable time to hack into a 99 dollar gizmo, and when done, having exactly nothing.

Just so your know - top Jailbreakers (like Geohot for instance) make more $$$ in donations and free hardware than you can ever dream off. Geohot once turned down $10K cash as a bounty for 3.1.2 unlock.. Not to mention sheer satisfaction of "freeing up" locked down products for millions of people.

So I wouldn't feel too sad for these guys if I were you.
 
We can thank the devteam/jailbreakers that enabled native apps on the iPhone.

Prior to that, when Steve Jobs gave birth to the iPhone in 2007, it was only meant to run Web-Apps. Because of the large interest of the dev community of wanting to code and run native apps and creating a custom tool-chain, Apple then released iPhone SDK 1.0 a year after along with AppStore.

Also, when the first Intel Macs came out, Steve said we are not allowing any other OSes other than Mac OSX to be installed on our Macs. But many people demanded Windows to be run os the iMac including business people. Months later, two hackers managed to create an EFI boot loader and booted to Windows XP. Critics said it was fake while others believed. Soon after that, Apple annouced Bootcamp as a public beta as a means to dual boot to Windows on Intel Macs.

I am not surprised if Apple released AppStore for the AppleTV's soon to be gaining popularity. The only thing that matters is when and "When the time is right."

Actually the position was that they would do nothing to stop it and nothing to help.Essentially neutral.Of course later they released bootcamp,guessing correctly that the ability to run both would ease the transition for switchers and sell more macs.But they never said they would not allow it.
 
This inexpensive device could make a great little server too. SSH in and run Apache, MySQL, php, bind9, irc with no problems using this hardware. Maybe connect a USB hard drive for extra storage. 100MBit ethernet to the WAN and share it via WLAN, acts as a router.

Now that's not a bad idea. And seeing that jailbroken phones can run all that (or at least most of it that I remember (dead 1st gen)), I'm sure the same will apply here. Maybe without modification from those ports.

The only thing I'll probably miss (when I get one) is how a patched ATV Classic can enable Screen Sharing. Problem now is that the Classic one used missing files that were available from Tiger installs. Since iOS isn't a stripped down Mac OSX Big Cat, then missing files would need to be recompiled. Some of that stuff comes from Darwin, where the source can be obtained, but other parts are private to Apple and won't be able to be replaced. I have a feeling that Screen Sharing falls into the latter camp.

Now, before someone asks "Why would you want Screen Sharing when it's got HDMI?"... Well, when someone else is watching cable and I want to "work on it" (post patch), I load up my ATV Classic into Screen Sharing on my Mac so I can see what's going on... Navigate around the menus, get into nitoTV, Software Menu, and others... Run updates, etc... All without forcing others to just sit and watch (when they'd rather be watching TV). I just wish it would recognize arrow key strokes passed through Screen Sharing to move around the menus and type into that stupid text entry "window", instead of having to still use the ATV's remote.

Yeah. I was going to hold off, but now that I'm getting better at Obj-C, it might be time to go ahead and get one. 99 bucks isn't too much to get an iOS playground for testing coding skills (even if you can't "Touch" it).
 
Does it use a coprocessor for the heavy-duty decoding? I thought Flash and Apple video both were variants of mp4 video.

Macs & Windows boxes with supported video cards and flash 10.1 can now offload web flash decoding to the GPU. No such driver/flash player exists for
the A4's SGX GPU, and it won't until flash comes to iOS. No one is holding their breath on that one.
 
Just so your know - top Jailbreakers (like Geohot for instance) make more $$$ in donations and free hardware than you can ever dream off. Geohot once turned down $10K cash as a bounty for 3.1.2 unlock.. Not to mention sheer satisfaction of "freeing up" locked down products for millions of people.

So I wouldn't feel too sad for these guys if I were you.

While I appreciate the dev tools they're provided, and while I too enjoy doing hardware hacks myself, I think there's a line where they would better serve the general public by making their own competing unit rather than hacking an existing one.

The pwnage and piss-flavored-snow lingo is pretty childish, IMO.
 
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