As youu can se here:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthrea...mp;pagenumber=6

Apple TV has been opened, the HArd disk has been changed for another bigger (120 GB_ without any problem, and droping Perion on the apple TV quicktime codec library, Apple TV can play almost anything, there are reports of Firefox running on Apple TV, and VLC...

So prepare everyone, this is gona be the new king of the living room. like the XBMC but with HD capabilities!

My Xbox360 plays HD Media.

Anyway, does anyone know what kind of HW is in this baby. There's talk of them getting OS X running on it? Could it finnally be hackable to be a low level mac system capable of running OS X and recieving updates? If so, (and it had accelerated graphics/sound), I would buy one and hack it.

If a web community has the right stuff for hacking this baby is this site (it used to be crippled media streamer yesterday).

There should be a forum dedicated to Apple TV hacking, stuff like make it run different apps, including finder, expanded codec support, taking it's software to any other OS X system, full USB support, things are going to get interesting...

It seems I got my wish.

Indeed ampTK. Great idea.

I'm moving this thread to that forum now, with a more specific title.

The ease at which you can bump the hard drive up and the Perian "support" has pretty much sold me on ?tv. Frankly I don't think Apple really cares about the HDD upgrade (the drive location just begs for easy upgrades) but they may shield off access to the QT frameworks if possible. We'll see but right now things are looking great.

things just got interesting enough for me to really consider buying one of these and modding/hacking the hell out of it. I'm looking forward to seeing the OS hacked and runnable on non-appletv hardware. I mean seriously it's supposedly running on an underclocked 1ghz pentium m, 256ddr, and a 64mb geforce g72m...we'll see the next few months will be exciting with leopard coming out this quarter and the possible advances with appletv...nice

I so want one now to play with it.

seriously I want one too! I didn't realize it had HDMI output and was capable of 1080i, that's just a huge bonus. I just got my tax refund in and i'm itching to spend it....dangerous situation!

It has a Pentium M Dothan SSE2 2M L2 processor.


Does it have hardware h264 decoding/encoding?

Per the apple website:
Video formats supported
* H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): Up to 5 Mbps, Progressive Main Profile (CAVLC) with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps)
* iTunes Store purchased video: 320 by 240 pixels or 640 by 480 pixels
* MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps)

can't tell you if it's hardware or software though :-/

I wonder how much a 7200 rpm drive would help in the performance.