AppleTV “Take 2″ Software Update Released

Apple has at long last released Apple TV (Software Update 2.0|Take 2).

We’re picking it apart on the wiki and in the forums, and there’s already a preliminary safe update for it (which I haven’t had time to test, I’m brewing beer )

Of interest, it doesn’t seem to shut down the USB port like in 1.x, you can stream iTunes from the computer to it, a-la Airport Express, and the 10.5.2 update I fought last night lets me choose mounted network volumes as Time Machine drives… HMM!
The new “startup movie” is pretty cool too, Leopard-ified.

God damn, four months without updating…  I should get back on this…

Sapphire Beta 4 Preview

Looks like the Sapphire crew is showing off the new version of their fantastic .frappliance, aptly named Sapphire.

For TV addicts like myself, this is great news and I can’t wait until this is released, which they’re calling for in early October.

ATV 1.1 Safe Update

Finally after a few weeks of putting it off, I have safe-updated my AppleTV to 1.1. Instructions are here.

HandBrake 0.9.0 Released

The HandBrake crew has released version 0.9.0 of their excellent DVD ripping software. In this release are a new GUI, much faster encoding, way more advanced options, Matroska containers, a “send to MetaX” option, and a bunch of other updates. Hit the jump for the full changelog.

Big List of AppleTV Resources

last100 has posted a big giant list of AppleTV resources, with reviews, wikis, books, podcasts, video conversion tutorials, and of course, hacks.

[last100.com via Digg.]

More hacks

Looks like the guys over at AwkwardTV have been pretty busy. They’ve managed to Enable USB Storage, got Bluetooth working, and have gotten SMB shares to mount with Apple’s kexts. (No more sharity light!) Big thanks to Turbo at 0xfeedbeef for coming up with a kernel extension enabler which blows most of this stuff wide open.

I have yet to try any of these yet, but it seems like the YouTube patch needs to be removed. You can downgrade to 1.0 by rebooting by holding menu-minus and then choosing Factory Restore. From there, break out your Patchstick and go nuts.

Technorati Tags: appletv, hacks, usb storage, bluetooth, smb, samba

MetaX: An Even Better MP4 Metadata Editor for the Mac

I forget where I found it, but MetaX is an even better MP4 container metadata editor based on AtomicParsley. Dump some movies into it, and it’ll query Amazon for things and fill in even more than Lostify. Stuff it can grab:

• Cover art
• Actors
• Directors/producers/screenwriters
• Release date/rating
• Batch processing

Best of all, it’s free and it moos at you upon completion.

AppleTV software updated to 1.1, YouTube support added

Apple has taken off the wraps off of the new AppleTV OS update. It’s version 1.1, and wipes out any customizations (SSH, etc) that you may have loaded. It contains the highly-anticipated YouTube Front Row Appliance, a UPNP security update, and a couple new frameworks. It also strips out a bunch of the leftover stuff from 10.4.7 such as the Bluetooth, remote share mounting, and other frameworks, which presumably saves some disk space. AppleTV.framework had some header files in it, and Alan Quatermain will probably be updating the BackRow Developer’s Kit pretty soon.

Details are evolving on the wiki as we pick this thing apart. Time to rebuild the patchstick.

Technorati Tags: appletv, youtube, patch, hack

Joost running on AppleTV, BRDK, YouTube frapplicance

Joost now works on the AppleTV. It doesn’t have a clean exit procedure, so it seems the best way to quit out of it is to crash it.

In other somewhat older news, Alan Quatermain (author of ATV Loader) has released the BackRow Developer’s kit and Xdog has cranked out A Series of Tubes, a plugin to play YouTube videos on the AppleTV.

Technorati Tags: appletv, hacks, awkwardtv, joost, atv loader, a series of tubes, backrow