I bought an Apple TV about a year ago. (Merry Christmas to me.) I used it a little, but it mostly sat on the shelf collecting dust.
Out of the box, the Apple TV is little more than novelty. You can watch YouTube videos, movie previews, or purchase expensive showings from the iTunes Store. Of course, you can also play whatever songs, podcasts, videos, etc. you have in your iTunes library on your TV, but in order for this to be useful... well, you have to have content in your iTunes library.
I have ripped a few DVDs to my library -- mostly for my kids -- using the excellent and free Handbrake, but on my dual-core Macbook Pro, it still takes more than 45 minutes per rip, and I just haven't bothered with that many. The same goes with my music. It's not that I don't like music (who doesn't like music). It's just that I don't want to spend the bulk of my time nurturing my media library.
So I watched Evolution of Dance and the Lego remake of Thriller a few times and then let the box gather dust.
...A year passes...
I knew of a small community of hackers toying with the Apple TV. That was one of the reasons I purchased it in the first place, but I had no real motivation to toy with my own until Boxee. My invitation to test the alpha version of the platform arrived a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, I could no longer resist the temptation to see what all the fuss was about.
Boxee is currently available only for the Mac and Linux platforms, but my interest was getting it to run on my Apple TV (which is basically just a little Mac). A year ago, making any customizations to your Apple TV required some time consuming hacking. To my delight, the process has been simplified greatly by a tool called ATV USB Creator (I love the creative name).
So here's how you install Boxee on your Apple TV: plug a spare thumb drive into your Mac, run ATV USB Creator, then plug the thumb drive into your Apple TV.
That's basically it. You'll want to make sure that your ATV is off (unplugged) when you first insert the drive. Then you'll plug it in, let the installation finish, unplug the thumb drive (very important) and reboot. Whoala! When your Apple TV comes back up again, you'll have a new option on the menu for Boxee.
But wait! You haven't actually installed Boxee yet, just the bootstrapping process. You'll have to chose Update from the menu and then select to install the latest version of Boxee. It will then be downloaded and installed automatically, and you can begin using it right away provided that you have already registered an account (currently in closed alpha, opening Jan 8).
This is where the real fun begins. You have options. Lots of options. You can stream music, movies and videos from a number of well-known sites. You can install your own plugins and point to media-rich RSS feeds. You can play files from your own local media library or from those available via shared resources on the network.
But my favorite option is Hulu. Hulu is the product of a partnership with NBC, Fox and several other media giants. You can stream a wide variety of on-demand, full-length TV shows and movies. And now you can do it on your Apple TV. Sweet.
But enough free praise for the media giants' lovechild. The streaming doesn't always work so well. And it's not my internet connection either. I've tried the service with a variety of bandwidth options from 5 Mbps to a verified 20 Mbps, and it doesn't seem to matter. It can be very difficult to get through a show without having to stop and "buffer" 50 times, and that's a real mood killer.
The playback on Boxee itself can be a bit choppy when playing hi-res video from Hulu. (And Boxee does not provide you a way to choose "low res" vs "hi res". You have to do this from hulu.com.) TV-quality video, however, remains fluid when Hulu will feed it to you fast enough.
Another gripe on the Boxee/Hulu combo is that Boxee does not provide you with a way to search for video, just browse. A workaround for this is to simply find what you want via your web browser on hulu.com and then add it to your queue.
Boxee is not ready to the point where I can say, "The future of TV is here." But the platform is still only in alpha. According to their blog, they will soon be adding support for streaming shows from ABC.com (Lost!) as well as the Discovery Channel. When that happens, my satellite TV provider may find that they have one less customer.
What You'll Need:
- Apple TV + USB thumb drive
- ATV USB Creator
- A Boxee account
- A Hulu account
