Geoff Hankerson

Applecore LLC has made an easy installer to aid you in hacking your AppleTV. It promises you a Safari or Web-Kit based browser with Flash enabled, opens many more codecs to allow more kinds of video playback and more.

I found it to be a mixed bag. My hopes were to be able to play files recorded off El Gato's EyeTV Digital Hybrid (terrestrial Hi Def broadcast TV) and watch flash video from Hulu and Abc.com.

Well I'm one for three - more like a half for three really.

First installation took a few tries but I got it to work - you have to install from the disk images not copy the installer elsewhere first) . It actually uses a specialized version of Linux to Hack the Apple TV. Next I fired off the Couch Surfer browser and went to ABC.com. No Flash. After a trip to their support forum I found you need to copy CoreAudioKit.framework from an Intel Mac running Tiger and then ftp it over to Apple TV - log in via SSH to the AppleTV and move the file into the correct place via the command line and reboot. Then Flash worked. Yeah.

Also copied 2 recordings from EyeTV to the AppleTV. BTW 10gb copy over wifi takes a few hours or so. But these mpeg 1/2 files won't play on hackTV. Rats. Plays on the Mac with Mplayer and Video Lan Client.

So then I tried ABC.com full episodes - can't get past the EULA form. There is a checkbox that needs to be check but Couch Surfer just can't check it. Must be some javascript it can't handle. Couch Surfer seems to crash a lot and force a restart of the Apple TV.

Last I tried Hulu. Well Hulu works. Yeah. But ... the video is position on the screen just in a spot where if I scroll it to the top of the page, the bottom 10% of the video gets cut off. If I scroll down then the top 15% is cut off. There is no fine scrolling with the Apple Remote and CouchSurfer.

Oh and full screen mode doesn't work either with Hulu.

I suppose what its really good for is playing torrents downloads in Xvid, Avi formats and the like. Looks like all your Ogg Theora stuff will work great. I'm trying to do it the legal way.

I think a Mac mini would have been the way to go - heck even one of those new small Dell PCs may have been better