I picked up a new toy at the Apple Store the other day. I was skeptical about it at first, since it doesn’t get the best reviews, nor is it the most popular Apple product, but so far I think it’s the perfect solution for me. I don’t watch much TV but when I do it’s usually pretty late at night and nothing actually good is on. For example I use to watch The Office every week, which airs at like 8/9PM on NBC problem is I’m never watching TV around that time to catch the new episodes. I know there are solutions, such as TiVO and DVR to accommodate me, but they come with monthly service fees and hardware rentals.
One of the first things I did after unpacking the Apple TV was hacked it using the following tutorial: Hack Your Apple TV With Boxee. It was a painless process and only took me 20 minutes to do. Now that I have installed the patch I can now watch any type of DRM free multimedia (e.g., DIVX, AVI, MKV, ISO and BIN) from any computer connected to my network. I can even play multimedia through internet streams (e.g. hulu, YouTube, podcast videos) which consist of a large collection of movies as well as many popular TV series. As long as you have a good internet connection, the video streaming works flawlessly and it’s nice to be able to browser through all the episodes of your favorite TV series and watch the latest episode from the series when you’re ready to watch it.
Even without hacking the Apple TV you can still rent or buy all new DVD titles and TV series for a reasonable price, but with the Boxee Patch you aren’t required to purchase anything, really. Another feature that comes with the Apple TV is the ability to share iTunes libraries on your network. So if you have a desktop computer on your network with all your music and videos, the Apple TV will make all the media available to you, similar to the Remote iPhone application. The Apple TV also makes it easy to stay up to date with your favorite Podcasts, if you enjoy a specific podcast, you can set it in your favorites and watch the latest episode as soon as it comes out.
Now I just need to find a good Home Theatre system and I’ll be set up nicely in my home office.