Apple TV and Boxee
We purchased an Apple TV sometime back as a decent way to control and stream my media library. The HP Media Smart Server is used to store and serve the music/video throughout the house, I will say both the Apple TV and the Media server have issues. The server comes with a iTunes server built in but doesn't seem to list all of the music library, so I hacked in and loaded iTunes on the server, it works okay besides it seems as though the server reboots about every two weeks or so and I have to log back in and get itunes running again. The Apple TV remote is painfully slow using the IR but there is an iPhone application to control it that seems snappy (covered in another post).
So I recently loaded Boxee ( http://www.boxee.tv ) on to the Apple TV it allows it to play about any content there is; there is a whole list of included codecs on their site, along with streaming content from Hulu; there is a bit torrent client built in, for being in Alpha testing it sure seems to have potential. I know Steve Jobs considers the appletv to be a hobby product, if this were really the case they would allow more hacking of it. The Boxee hack is pretty strait forward using a nice little application from Google Code. I had a little trouble getting the "patch stick" made being as I read the directions..lol.. but after a little help from my genius its all rolling and Boxee is running.
Boxee adds a social networking aspect to your media, I can add people I know and it shows what they watched or listened to and they can see what I like. Boxee finds art work for movies and music automatically I think better than the standard AppleTV software does. Below are a couple links to maybe help you out
http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/
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