Order Pizza on your AppleTV

siteadmin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:31:44 +0000

Unlike the iPod, the AppleTV certainly hasn’t been the marketing success that Apple hoped for but hackers sure love it.
From the day that the AppleTV shipped, hackers have dissected the diminutive media player and found ways to add cool and innovative features like playing new video formats, upgrading the hard drive and turning one into a fully working Mac OS X computer.
One modification enables you to order pizza directly from the AppleTV with just the remote control, perfect for the lazy college student that wants to order pizza without taking time to boot up their laptop computer.

What can a hacked AppleTV do?
Play various video formats in addition to Mp4
Order pizza
Make Skype calls
Use a web browser
Run a full version of Mac OS X
Use a keyboard and mouse
Use an external hard drive
Enable file server and web server
Getting started with Hacking an AppleTV
The first hacks for the AppleTV involved a bit of surgery and exposure to AppleTV innards. The hard drive had to be removed, mounted into a USB hard drive enclosure and special software loaded from a Macintosh before re-installation back into the AppleTV. But the process has been refined to a no-screwdriver-required method. The Patchstick Method involves installing software on a USB flash drive and plugging it into the AppleTV’s USB port which Apple reserves for repairs. When the AppleTV boots up, the thumb drive automatically loads the software needed to connect remotely to the media player and install other modifications.
Why do hackers love the AppleTV?
Apple’s media player is the perfect piece of computer hardware. First, it’s smaller than even a Mac Mini, uses low power, is quiet and is relatively inexpensive compared to other media center computers. Additionally, the AppleTV has the right video connectors to hook to a new HD TV and a remote control. Underneath the hood, the AppleTV is really a single board computer with a relatively powerful processor running an interface program Back Row. Hackers only needed to enable the parts of Mac OS X that Apple had hidden and then they had a full computer to load whatever software that they wanted. Once one of the media players has been modified to run an unrestricted copy of Mac OS X, the AppleTV becomes the least expensive Macintosh available coming in at nearly half the price of a Mac Mini.
This probably voids the warranty
Apple will make little effort to make sure that future software updates to the AppleTV do not break any modifications, so owners of modified AppleTVs may not be able to take advantage of new features and bug fixes provided by Apple. But then again, there’s always a new hack out. Check out AppleTVhacks for an ongoing list of hacks, modifications and How-To’s.

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DIY:Build your own Media Player from an old PDA

siteadmin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:19:51 +0000

The Core Pocket Media Player, TCPMP, for short, is a program for Windows PocketPC, Windows Mobile and PalmOS that allows you play music and video files. With this free program on your PDA, it will play videos just like an iPod or Zune. And on PDAs with the right type of screen, it will even switch to wide screen mode, which is a feature that iPod did not have until the iPhone and the iPod Touch debuted.
One of the advantages of TCPMP over an iPod is that supports multiple video formats like DivX and Windows Media Video. Although the free version of TCPMP is no longer under development as open source software, it can still be downloaded. The developers have taken the software commercial under the name CorePlayer and added support for more media types and added support for mobile devices like Symbian OS.
Encoding Video
These applications should install into your PDA through Microsoft’s ActiveSync like any other program. After the player is installed, you need to feed it some content. TCPMP or CorePlayer will play audio files like MP3, but most people are interested in video. If you have enough storage, you could drag almost any video file to your PDA and they would play, but that would be a waste of battery power and flash drive space.
Encoding, or shrinking, the video to fit your screen will save you from recharging as often and allow you to squeeze more video on your PDA at one time. PocketDivXEncoder is a great utility for Windows that has preset video options to shrink video to fit your PDA and it can encode from several video formats. With this utility, you can squeeze a typical hour-long episode of your favorite show into about a 100 MB without noticing any degradation of the video on your PDA. Usually, a video quality setting of 12 or 13 will be fine for most PDAs.
If you want to copy video directly from your DVD collection, then Handbrake is a great option. A Windows version was recently released and supports direct encoding from DVD. If you use the Windows version of HandBrake, then you will need to change the output video encoder from the default MP4 to Xvid and change the output audio encoder from AAC, an Apple Audio format, to the more common MP3 format. CorePlayer and TCPMP both support Xvid and MP3 formats, so the video should be ready to copy over to the PDA. In some cases, it is simplest to rip DVDs using HandBrake in Xvid format and then shrink them to PDA size with PocketDivXEncoder, but that increases the video prep time. Fortunately, both encoding programs supporting queueing, which allows you set the computer to encode multiple files sequentially.

Storage
After you get the hang of encoding video, you will find that whatever amount of storage that came built in to your mobile device is not enough. Thankfully, most PDAs support Compact Flash or Secure Digital cards like the ones that cameras use, so upgrading your storage should be inexpensive.
Admittedly, the interface on your homemade mobile media player will not be as slick as an iPod or Zune, but the actual video will not look much different. With these tools, you can take your entertainment center with you wherever you go and satiate your iPod envy on a shoestring budget.

[tags]iPod, Media Player, encoding, Zune[/tags]

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Order Pizza on your AppleTV

DIY:Build your own Media Player from an old PDA