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My AppleTV with OSX experience! (High res shots)
- Thread starter taylorwilsdon
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Kingsly
macrumors 68040
SSpiro
macrumors 6502a
Has anyone done a test/evaluation of whether/how the eyeTV products work with Apple TV? On their website Elgato indicates that eyeTV will record TV, and automatically download it to Itunes and then export it for iPod. Has anyone tried that? Does the programing show up in the apple tv lists? Thanks.
I think you might be missing what I'm doing here. I'm running full OSX ON my AppleTV and using the physical AppleTV to record shows with Eyetv.
srf4real
macrumors 68040
What a trip! I have that exact same pencil holder on my desk!😀 Oh, and congrats on the other neat trick, too.😛
Couple of quick questions -
Can you still run backrow if you instal the full os?
Can you still sync it to your Mac's iTunes library?
I'm looking to pick one up, thing is I want to use it as a regular Apple TV syncing and streaming from my macs, but also have safari and mail on there for "net in the den" and also it would be cool to enable Bluetooth for KB/M action
is that possible?
cheers
Can you still run backrow if you instal the full os?
Can you still sync it to your Mac's iTunes library?
I'm looking to pick one up, thing is I want to use it as a regular Apple TV syncing and streaming from my macs, but also have safari and mail on there for "net in the den" and also it would be cool to enable Bluetooth for KB/M action
is that possible?
cheers
gkarris
macrumors G3
The Stig
macrumors 6502a
Question:
I've heard you can boot
tv off of a external HD. Can you get a bootable image of OSX and run in on the tv without taking it apart.
My idea is to have a LaCai drive plugged into it and ran OSX from it the USB port and have the extra USB ports on the HD for keyboard, mouse, etc.
I wouldn't want to take it apart if I didn't have to. But it would work great for my mom who only surfs the internet and plays internet games on it.
Thanks,
The Stig
I've heard you can boot
tv off of a external HD. Can you get a bootable image of OSX and run in on the tv without taking it apart.My idea is to have a LaCai drive plugged into it and ran OSX from it the USB port and have the extra USB ports on the HD for keyboard, mouse, etc.
I wouldn't want to take it apart if I didn't have to. But it would work great for my mom who only surfs the internet and plays internet games on it.
Thanks,
The Stig
shu82
macrumors 6502a
Question:
I've heard you can boot
My idea is to have a LaCai drive plugged into it and ran OSX from it the USB port and have the extra USB ports on the HD for keyboard, mouse, etc.
I wouldn't want to take it apart if I didn't have to. But it would work great for my mom who only surfs the internet and plays internet games on it.
Thanks,
The Stig
It cant boot off of an external hard drive. There is no firewire port. All you can do is take the hard drive out, format and load it in another mac and then reinsert it.
balamw
Moderator emeritus
AFAIK it will boot from external, but only (so far) to do a restore of the OS, which does allow you to perform some modifications without opening the box. You do have to somehow get the format right for the boot drive which either requires access to a
TV drive or obtaining an image through other means.B
spencecb
Suspended
Wow, this is pretty exciting. Apple really outdid themselves with this, and didn't really seem to cover their tracks very well, in having consumers find out that this really is a Mac. With no optical drive. Pretty cool.
Makes me think there are bigger things to come with the first revision of this product.
Makes me think there are bigger things to come with the first revision of this product.
Sorry for my lack of replies here, I've been bizzy 😛
Anyways, I'll do my best to field some of them right now. You can (although I personally haven't) boot off an external USB harddrive. Just so people know, you DON'T need firewire for that (or anything else, its a dying format 😡)
Component video works as far as I can tell but my testing monitor does not have any component sound ports so I didn't test the sound aspect.
Er, I guess you can. Not sure why you would want to, I think frontrow looks better. You can sync it like you would with any other Mac connected to a network and using the Library Share tool.
Anyways, I'll do my best to field some of them right now. You can (although I personally haven't) boot off an external USB harddrive. Just so people know, you DON'T need firewire for that (or anything else, its a dying format 😡)
Component video works as far as I can tell but my testing monitor does not have any component sound ports so I didn't test the sound aspect.
Er, I guess you can. Not sure why you would want to, I think frontrow looks better. You can sync it like you would with any other Mac connected to a network and using the Library Share tool.
Stand back everyone, it's time to try science!
Hi everyone, first post (long time reader though)
Couple of questions for taylorwilsdon -
Firstly, have you tried using an optical drive on the same IDE bus as the hard disk? For that matter, has anyone tried to use a master and a slave device (be it harddisk or otherwise) at the same time? This would be a neat-o way of getting a cd/dvd/burner drive without using up a usb port, and would be significantly faster. Fun!
Secondly, has anyone tried installing windows? This would certainly smoke some of the entry level computers I've seen for sale, and very cheap too. I'm under the impression that the firmware in AppleTV is based on EFI, like normal macs - otherwise, how would an unmodified OSX image be able to run? it has specific TPM and EFI dependencies (that raises another question, I'll come back it it). Presumably, the EFI would be upgradeable. Perhaps you could firstly try a linux live disk (or Windows installation disk) to see if the EFI implementation supports BIOS, and if it doesn't you could always try flashing it with the firmware upgrades that came out with the initial bootcamp release. This may result in a brick, though. I don't have enough experience with this sort of thing to know.
Thirdly, can we see some xBench (or similar benchmarking) scores? I hate to be a pain, but "crisp" is very subjective. I often turn on my mac and go and make a cup of coffee while it loads, but it's fast enough for me. My father, on the other hand, thinks his new Intel iMac (2.33Ghz) is slow. I realise that the score may be effected by the lack of video driver, but still things like the cpu score and ram score would be helpful. Possibly compare to your nice snazzy lappy, or any other mac you have lying around.
*EDIT* I just found this on the xbench site: http://db.xbench.com/csi.xhtml?machineTypeID=37 can you still run the tests, and confirm a similar score? According to the 100 baseline (being a 2.0Ghz G5), this seems pretty snappy. Not far behind the Mac Mini, for (average 89)! We're looking at a little higher then half the performance for half the price. Maybe the graphics drivers will bump that up? */EDIT*
Anyways, three experiments I thought I'd contribute. The interesting point I was thinking of is this - Apple must have built the AppleTV with a TPM chip. Why? Is is because they couldn't be bothered modifying their OS to the extent of supporting non-TPM hardware? Is it to make sure the AppleTV OS isn't run on non-Apple hardware? (Has anyone tried that? I know you can run OSX on generic hardware) Perhaps it's designed as a security precaution that we'll see later - possibly an extension of DRM? I can imagine the idea of binding a license to specific hardware is attractive.
I'll slink back into the darkness now. I'm seriously seriously considering getting the AppleTV for a friend I was going to sell my aging G3 400mhz iMac DV to - I have sufficient screens etc to make up the rest of the deal. Perhaps we'll be seeing hacked AppleTVs showing up on ebay, pretending to be minis ^_^
Hi everyone, first post (long time reader though)
Couple of questions for taylorwilsdon -
Firstly, have you tried using an optical drive on the same IDE bus as the hard disk? For that matter, has anyone tried to use a master and a slave device (be it harddisk or otherwise) at the same time? This would be a neat-o way of getting a cd/dvd/burner drive without using up a usb port, and would be significantly faster. Fun!
Secondly, has anyone tried installing windows? This would certainly smoke some of the entry level computers I've seen for sale, and very cheap too. I'm under the impression that the firmware in AppleTV is based on EFI, like normal macs - otherwise, how would an unmodified OSX image be able to run? it has specific TPM and EFI dependencies (that raises another question, I'll come back it it). Presumably, the EFI would be upgradeable. Perhaps you could firstly try a linux live disk (or Windows installation disk) to see if the EFI implementation supports BIOS, and if it doesn't you could always try flashing it with the firmware upgrades that came out with the initial bootcamp release. This may result in a brick, though. I don't have enough experience with this sort of thing to know.
Thirdly, can we see some xBench (or similar benchmarking) scores? I hate to be a pain, but "crisp" is very subjective. I often turn on my mac and go and make a cup of coffee while it loads, but it's fast enough for me. My father, on the other hand, thinks his new Intel iMac (2.33Ghz) is slow. I realise that the score may be effected by the lack of video driver, but still things like the cpu score and ram score would be helpful. Possibly compare to your nice snazzy lappy, or any other mac you have lying around.
*EDIT* I just found this on the xbench site: http://db.xbench.com/csi.xhtml?machineTypeID=37 can you still run the tests, and confirm a similar score? According to the 100 baseline (being a 2.0Ghz G5), this seems pretty snappy. Not far behind the Mac Mini, for (average 89)! We're looking at a little higher then half the performance for half the price. Maybe the graphics drivers will bump that up? */EDIT*
Anyways, three experiments I thought I'd contribute. The interesting point I was thinking of is this - Apple must have built the AppleTV with a TPM chip. Why? Is is because they couldn't be bothered modifying their OS to the extent of supporting non-TPM hardware? Is it to make sure the AppleTV OS isn't run on non-Apple hardware? (Has anyone tried that? I know you can run OSX on generic hardware) Perhaps it's designed as a security precaution that we'll see later - possibly an extension of DRM? I can imagine the idea of binding a license to specific hardware is attractive.
I'll slink back into the darkness now. I'm seriously seriously considering getting the AppleTV for a friend I was going to sell my aging G3 400mhz iMac DV to - I have sufficient screens etc to make up the rest of the deal. Perhaps we'll be seeing hacked AppleTVs showing up on ebay, pretending to be minis ^_^
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
Well, I've been using an EyeTV to record TV and transcode it to iTunes for a while now. Works just fine. It records, then it sends to iTunes. If I had a video iPod, and left it plugged in, it would sync to the iPod automatically. I assume you could have it sync with an
tv the same way; although since I don't have an tv, I can't confirm.taylorwilsdon: Sweet. Any details or a web link? I did a quick search but I couldn't find anything. However, I found the following on awkwardTV:
"Since Apple TV is EFI-based and apparently has no CSM BIOS emulation, we need an EFI-based bootloader."
This confirms what I mentioned before. Wondering how the BIOS compatibility was worked out. What I'd like now is some futureMark scores under XP - I can think of so many integrated systems that would be completely blown away by this. Has anyone else heard of the VIA mini-ITX series? Another interesting idea would be to try ATITool or Clockgen, to see if it can be overclocked at all. Would be interesting!
"Since Apple TV is EFI-based and apparently has no CSM BIOS emulation, we need an EFI-based bootloader."
This confirms what I mentioned before. Wondering how the BIOS compatibility was worked out. What I'd like now is some futureMark scores under XP - I can think of so many integrated systems that would be completely blown away by this. Has anyone else heard of the VIA mini-ITX series? Another interesting idea would be to try ATITool or Clockgen, to see if it can be overclocked at all. Would be interesting!
syriana
macrumors member
presentation tool?
anybody had try Keynote app on that? it seems a perfect fit for that..
but keynote is said (by ) to require 512 Mo RAM...
I saw an app that can sync USB stick content on OSX on two different Mac.
Then you have your Mac at home, your TV where you usually do your presentation (college, university, others..) and travel with only the weight of your usb stick!! for 299$!! would be cool..
anybody had try Keynote app on that? it seems a perfect fit for that..
but keynote is said (by
) to require 512 Mo RAM...I saw an app that can sync USB stick content on OSX on two different Mac.
Then you have your Mac at home, your
TV where you usually do your presentation (college, university, others..) and travel with only the weight of your usb stick!! for 299$!! would be cool..
Avatar74
macrumors 68000
I'm just waiting to find out how many people end up frying their AppleTV by sticking in larger hard drives that could potentially generate heat beyond the tested tolerances of the ostensibly fanless unit.
When they realize they've voided their warranties and are out $300 plus the cost of the new drive, maybe they'll be thinking, "Hmm, maybe Apple limited it to a 40 gigabyte drive for a good reason."
When they realize they've voided their warranties and are out $300 plus the cost of the new drive, maybe they'll be thinking, "Hmm, maybe Apple limited it to a 40 gigabyte drive for a good reason."