The Connected Circuit

Apple TV is one of the greatest things to have in a living, that is if you soft-mod it with boxee, the open source media plugin based on the code of the wildly popular (well at least with the geek crowd) XMBC. The Apple TV has always piqued my interest, which is strange it being the least popular Apple product, but back about two months ago when I heard that someone created a way to watch Hulu (albeit a bit chuggy) and other internet content easily on your TV with the Apple TV, I knew it would be the perfect addition to a home entertainment setup that I was planning to create for months. When I found out that I had a friend that had an Apple TV that he wanted to sell, I promptly took it off his hands at the going eBay street price. First thing I did was upgrade it to the latest firmware (Take 2.2) I created a patchstick for it using the ATV-creator with boxee/xmbc preloaded and in minutes (link here for video tutorial on how to make a patchstick with boxee) I was off and running. So what do I think of the Apple TV and boxee? In short, I think both are a almost-killer app and with the recent $4 million in funding this project received, it will only be get better from here on out.

Note: When I initially wrote this review, I had the Take 2.2 firmware on it and not the new 2.3 firmware that Apple pushed out. But when I restarted my Apple TV this weekend, it updated automatically with the 2.3 and effectively killed boxee, but there is already a fix to get it back up and running, which I did today. The new atv-creator patchstick now works under a Windows environment, so I do not have to use my roommate’s Macbook to create a patchstick. One caveat was that I had to use the USB drive image tool from the command line, which was really simple. Link here is to a team boxee member showing how to get boxee back on your ATV.

--written by Peter To--