Apple TV Hacked

I have a first generation streaming network player connected to my stereo and I really like the concept the idea rocks really. Store all your music, films, photo’s etc. on your computer and then play it via your network using one of these little gems. However it seems there has been very little development in this space since the first generation hit the online shops a few years ago. Recently apple joined the market with Apple TV. As you would expect it is a very sleek looking thing and the interface is supposed to be gorgeous. To be honest that is the biggest problem with the first generation stuff. It is a bloody horrible interface particular to navigate 20 – 30 Gb of music.

The Apple TV box comes with some issues out of the box. Only supports iPod formats and it only has a smallish harddrive. But wait and behold as the clever geeks of the world crack away on these issues. There are now somewhat complicated but reliable ways of upgrading the harddrive to something bigger and better still there seems to be ways to load new codecs like divX and Xvid on the box and make it play what you want. Of course there are also the usual efforts to make it do all sorts of other things like run Linux and operate as an Asterix PBX amongst other things. Most seem to be coming along rather nicely. Might make this enter in the upgrade path of the Neuston. Although it sounds i some reviews as if you need a HD display TV to make use of it. Alternatively I could supplement the Neuston with a Squeezebox 3 from Slim Devices to take care of the music and just use the Neuston for video which it does quite well. It even loads sub and srt files for your divx collection. Not bad for a cheap 2003/2004 device.

That all still leaves pictures on the scaffold. Regardless I am going to need more central storage the 4 old SCSI harddrives in the old IBM Netfinity server down in the garage only make it up to 80Gb, not enough for anything so I maintain a full copy of everything on a 250Gb USB drive which is quickly running out. The Netfinity is a pentium III and does only support usb 1 so can’t just plug it together. I tried installing a USB 2 PCI card in the box, but that just caused BSOD every 2 hours. Not acceptable for a home server. Ended up with a dodgy IBM Netvista desktop through some ebay dealing and may see if I can get that to tun reliably. At the moment I think it is short of power and activating certain menues in the GUI makes it lockup or restart. Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are too expensive for what they are and you can generally not use them as a swiss army knife of online services. Although some NAS devices does allow some basic application services as well. My home server needs to provide:

• eBay snipping
• Bit Torrent + E-mule P2P services
• Media Server for Neuston and potentially other devices
• File 250Gb+, Backup and Print services (although our printers are now both ethernet capable)

I would like to also have:

• FTP
• HTTP
• VPN (via Router or Hamachi)