Install Leopard on Apple TV?

[Cave Man]

I suspect that it's not possible without modding the boot loading process, but has anyone tried?

If one could get Leopard's Front Row (and ancillary apps) installed on the ATV, then one could bypass iTunes' restrictions on playing through Quicktime only. This would permit the reading of DVD VIDEO_TS folders straight from a hard drive and provide 5.1 surround.

Any ideas? Hopefully, this will become unnecessary by Tuesday.

 

[rogersmj]

Forget Leopard, you can't even get Tiger running 100% on the Apple TV, and the ATV was designed for Tiger. I have a hard drive that I setup with Tiger for the Apple TV, and I had to do some hacking just to get the ethernet to work. The biggest problem, however, is that there's no sound. The Apple TV uses a special sound system that regular OS X does not contain drivers for. Keep in mind that OS X was first loaded onto the ATV nine months ago and still no one has figured a way around this. I spent hours upon hours, and I got nowhere. The latest theory is that the drivers for the sound system are actually inside the kernel, which you have to replace with a custom one (which is compiled by some hackers from regular OS X) when you hack the ATV to load OS X. Since you're not using the official kernel supplied by Apple, you have no sound.

 

[Cave Man]

The biggest problem, however, is that there's no sound. The Apple TV uses a special sound system that regular OS X does not contain drivers for...Since you're not using the official kernel supplied by Apple, you have no sound.

That's a bummer. That also includes audio passthrough out the optical port, as opposed to the RCA jacks? It would really make the ATV the near-perfect media hub since you could run Leopard's Front Row and access external drives and DVD/Blu-Ray/Whatever USB devices plug-in devices.