It is fun to be able to play with tech. I learned about Boxee from a podcast (source now forgotten) and received an invitation to download the alpha some weeks ago (no longer an issue). I was interested in streaming video sources and Boxee appeared to be a way to integrate multiple sources. At about this same time, NetFlix began streaming to the Mac (using Silverlight). I experimented with these tools on my Mac, but wanted to be able to display the video on a much larger screen.
I somehow got the idea that the AppleTV was the hardware necessary to get the video to a HDTV and convinced Cindy it would make a great birthday present. I did have some of the details wrong – I assumed you could stream anything from your Mac to AppleTV if you made use of this strange hack that required to prepare a flash drive with some special software and boot to this flashdrive instead of the hard drive of the AppleTV. This may still be possible, but not with the software I used.
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I do need to read a little more carefully. You don\’t really stream everything from your Mac to the AppleTV and the flash drive is for installing software on the AppleTV (a little more risky than I had originally thought although there may be another technique out there that does not require modification of the AppleTV itself).
The method for modifying the AppleTV makes use of code written by the Google people so I was willing to give it a go (Hack technique). It took a little experimentation, but I was able to get it to work. The AppleTV works as originally intended and has the added features of Boxee. The unique benefit of Boxee as far as I can tell is mainly that it offers access to HULU. NetFlix works on a regular computer, but not on the AppleTV (at least not yet).
Fun project.
