AppleTV Alternatives?
 

I'm currently checking out alternatives to AppleTV, does anyone own a "tv-compatible harddrive" such as this one:

http://www.amazon.com/TrekStor-Movie...471 22&sr=8-1

The Phillips DVD 5960/5982 or something like that comes with a USB connection. It's about $40 or $50 and you can use a USB hard drive with it to play movies. Total cost for a 500GB drive + DVD player would be about $200.

http://www.amazon.com/Philips-DVP596...481 33&sr=1-1

that's a pretty good solution... all these standalone hard drives are missing hdmi and this allows me to use my current external HDs :thumbsup

thx! :)

I have the real thing and I love it :)

just install MythtV on a linux machine

Don't you have to convert almost all your movies to a specific format to use the AppleTV with it's smaller hard drive too?

I wish they'd open it up and allow divx, etc..

yeah, what bugs me is that it only comes with a 160 GB HD... I'd love to have the fancy itunes menu for browsing though :1orglaugh

Concerning divx and xvid playback - I guess there are some hacks around...

I am in the same boat, I want Apple TV but I want to use it to play divx/xvid files, I've read you can basically just create containers for em to play in Itunes, but I've never tried. Gonna do some tests soon.

anyone got their appletv hacked?

lacie lacinema

Wait a few days - one of the rumors is that Apple will have a complete media solution to be announced on Tuesday. Sort of like apple TV on steroids.

Yea, its really easy to do now... just download the hack on onto a usb thumbdrive, plug it in to the apple tv and reboot.

Then you can install all the third party plugins etc to play any kind of media you want.

The apple tv, even with all the hacks, isnt all that spectacular, but its ok, and the price is decent. And if you arent familiar with the unix command line at all, I wouldnt recommend buying an apple tv to hack it... you'll still have to fall back to that sort of thing every once in a while. You can install vanilla OSX on it though, and linux.

You can also put mythtv frontend on it.

I had a MythTV box but bought a few AppleTVs for giveaways and ended up cracking one open to play with here at home. It's simple to use and absolutely NO HASSLES. It was simply Plug and Play.

mythtv looks good, what kinda system did you install it on?

Not sure of the specs, but it was my old (18 months or so) HP desktop.

You can run MythTV on Linux or on osX (current svn seems to work) e.g. on a mac mini currently there is some work on running the Frontend on a windows OS.
I run it on a Hiper Group hmc-2k53a with a Gentoo Linux on it. The VFD works, but could be bigger.

No need to use the internal HD, I simply stream from itunes without copying anything and it works well.

Xbox Media Center installed on an old Xbox. Works amazingly well and won't cost much at all, especially if you already have an old Xbox laying around.