Wait… It Is Great
It seems I spoke too soon in saying Apple TV does not support alternate codecs. Perian is an OSS component wrapper for Quicktime which supports a boatloat of formats, Xvid and DivX included.
Consider it a done deal, I’m sold. I looks like the little white box has a very bright future indeed.
March 24th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I don’t think that’s going to do it for you. The Apple TV definitely won’t play some content that iTunes and Quick Time will. There is, however, a function in iTunes to convert content that it can play to a format that Apple TV can play. I would test that with some Perian-wrapped content before taking the plunge.
My guess is that there will be some updates for the Apple TV software that will enable more formats, content streamed from the Internet via iTunes, and other content. I don’t think there are any hardware issues that would limit that, so I think it really is a matter of a software update.
One possibility is that Apple was in a hurry to get this out the door, but I think there’s more to it than that. There’s a difference in consumer expectations between computer equipment and audio-visual equipment. Things like crashing, rebooting, buffering, etc., which are normal in the computer world aren’t acceptable in audio-visual equipment. I think Apple recognizes that, and they’re trying, not always successfully, to address that.
March 24th, 2007 at 11:35 am
It’s possible, albeit clumsy at the moment. For being out less than a week, that’s progress as far as hacks go. The good news is that Apple did not lock it down with a hypervisor, so “homebrew” on it should be simple.
I am not planning on getting it until April. By them I am sure someone will have an easier way to do all this.
March 24th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Yeah, I read that description. For me that’s the same as it being impossible. But by April things could indeed change a lot. I’m hoping that Apple releases an update before too long that makes playback of MPEG-4 files as smooth as H.264 files, and it would be nice if I could listen to streaming audio from the Internet, either though iTunes or, even better, directly from the Apple TV. If I could stream content directly from the Internet to the Apple TV, it starts to look more like a cable box, which I think is more where this fits, than as, say, a TiVo alternative.