Mon, 28 May 2007

ARCO Commercial: Underground City in 1991

Back in the 1970's, ARCO painted a pretty grim picture for life in the year 1991. You remember 1991? When everyone was forced to go live in the underground city? It didn't really end up happening, and we owe a world of thanks to ARCO Petroleum for saving our way of life above the surface.

[/funny] permanent link

AppleTV Hacks

I felt a little guilty doing it, but I tore into the AppleTV on Sunday. It was very painless. I partially peeled back the rubber mat, used the T8 on the 4 screws, and then peeled it back a little further for the 4 T10 screws that held the hard drive in place. Popped it into the USB-IDE shell I bought for $10 at Frys, which powered the drive just fine off the USB bus. Two partitions showed up -- "OSBoot" and somehing like "Media". The simplest method for hacking the drive is to copy over sshd from an intel OSX mac and a configuration file to make it run at startup.

The hack didn't work at first because I copied the plist file directly off my laptop. I don't have SSH enabled, so thats probably why it didn't work. I used another xml file i found on a AppleTV wiki and that did the trick.

Because of the sshd binary i used, I can only do ssh v1 (ssh -1 [host]). You login as "frontrow" and "frontrow". There is a silly challenge/response at first, just ignore that and enter the password. At this point, I could sudo and do whatever I wanted on the box. Note that the OS partition is mounted as read only by default. mount -uw / and mount -ur / are your friends here to mount writable and read-only, respectively.

I really don't like spending lots of time h4x0ring the AppleTV in a shell...its kinda irritating. Thats why the first (and last) plugin I manually installed as the Awkward TV loader. This shows up right on the main menu and lets you load and unload various plugins published on the awkward TV plug-in site. This plugin reads an RSS feed to determine the lastest plugins and lets you load them right on the box with your remote. After the installation is complete, it soft resets the box (probably just restarts FrontRow) and you are set with your plugin.

My most favorite plugin so far is the "Series of Tubes" plugin. This lets you watch YouTube in all its overcompressed 320x240 glory on your HDTV. The plugin does some smart things in the background, including prefetching and caching of YouTube videos as you browse "Featured" and various "Most Viewed/Discussed/etc" top rankings before you even get a chance to start watching.

The only unfortunate thing is that there is no way to login as yourself and watch subscribed content or browse much further beyond the preset filters. But I am certain its only a matter of time before this is resolved. Its only on version 1.0.1. "A Series of Tubes" is also remarkably stable for the second release. "Series of Tubes" requires the Perian codec pack (you might need to copy these right into the quicktime directory using SCP).

Other plugins include Omelette, which is sort of a shiney egg bejewelled 3-in-a-row game. "Streamer", a very basic streaming audio application, mplayer wrappers so you can play your DVDs, a perl engine for FrontRow, etc. They all seamlessly work with FrontRow, just adding yet another cute menu item on the spinny display.

Lastly, I am really enjoying all of that 720p "HD Podcast" content available. There is some pretty good stuff available that I have found. The video quality is great...which was a real shocker. Offline content delivered to your HDTV is definately a killer app in its self, assuming the content is rich enough for anyone to want to view it. Its tough finding non-techie shows though....even if its some bouncy hottie rambling on about RSS feeds.

[/tv] permanent link

Sun, 27 May 2007

Is the AppleTV the Beginning of the End of Broadcast Television?

I bought an Apple TV this weekend, to which my friends immediately asked why I bought such a poorly reviewed product. Yes, this first revision has some faults. However, for a first generation product, it brings a very interesting paradigm shift to the way someone views television.

Some of its faults really show almost immedately. Is it a $299 TV video adapter, or a self-contained set top box? Its flip-floppy dependence on iTunes extremely complicates that determination. Content is either streamed from the computer or stored locally on the box, depending on if iTunes bothered to synchronize the content yet. I can see how this can be useful (most people have most of their content initally on a PC or Mac of some sort), but I really wish once I tell it the podcasts I want to subscribe to, it would check and download it directly on the box itself.

Besides, if you really wanted to change the way this worked, there is great news. The AppleTV is extremely hackable -- and in an native, friendly way. There is no need for crappy GUIs made by engineers. You can easily intergrate your additions to AppleTV using the FrontRow API. (FrontRow is the pretty, shiny, black interface). There are plugins available for YouTube, RSS feeds, weather, sports, and just about anyhing you can think of. If you are not a savy C developer life myself, you can even execute PERL scripts using a PERL script plug-in. Also, when Apple gets off their butt and starts adding really neat features to this product, like...how about being able to actually BUY crap ON AppleTV? While im sitting on my couch? I found myself much more willing to purchase content while sitting in front of the television than digging up the laptop, and buying it through iTunes, and remembering the fact that I am actually telling it to bill my credit card. It would be like pay-per-view.

Also, Apple didn't include any DVIX/etc codecs (gee...i wonder why? Could it be that 99% of folks would use this to play their pirated content off bittorrent?), but you can put these on yourself.

But this is all software and design concept. The hardware is there, and it works, so lets just forget about the iTunes dependency for the moment.

After a several hour synchornization (I only have about 1.5GB of MP3s, and 5GB of images), my AppleTV had all content stored locally. You can start viewing all of your content off the bat, but it required streaming it from the laptop. Not bad...unless...since this is a laptop..it goes into hibernation, runs out of batteries, or follows me to the office, etc. I subscribed to a couple video podcasts for things that interested me, including several 720p podcasts of interest, and various professional news outlets.

So far, I am quite impressed. I am able to watch all sorts off offline content (podcasts) to my hearts content. Every hour, the newsbrief videos and audio update. When I idle, a bunch of my digital pictures fly around the screen. I can watch iPhoto slideshows based on roll with effects and the ken burns effect, listen to pre-created iTunes playlists, view movies -- both premium content purchased and views of my own, movie previews, etc.

Can it replace my satellite service? Potentially. Most of the media we view at home is on-demand content via internet. I have looked down on Podcasts in the past, but with the introduction of AppleTV , several new content startups have started producing high quality shows -- some of which are in 720p (HDTV) resolution. The HD podcasts are at least 150-250MB a shot, but since synchornization is done in the background, I really don't notice much. While iTunes features a lot of good video podcast content for adults (Including a bunch of free Family Guy episodes directly from Fox), there is very limited content for children. The only thing interesting I have found so far is the "Vintage Tooncast", featuring cartoons with expired copyrights. These are the $1.99 DVDs your mom buys on sale at the grocery store. They are okay, but for my three year old, she likes the recent gimmicks such as that stupid yellow thing named Bob, etc. I might have to convert some of her DVDs over so she can watch them on the AppleTV.

The video display, although very basic, is quite a performer. 720p HD is as smooth as you would expect. I have the display mode in 1920x1080i, so it has to work extra hard upscaling everything. The ken burns effect combined with transition effects works at full frame rate in 1080i mode. I just love photo slideshows on my HDTV....and since the resolution is high, you can actually see intricate details of the imagery (1920x1080 is double what my little MacBook will do too).

I think with a few hacks (or plug-ins), this AppleTV might be a contender to my Satellite TV service....which we haven't watched all weekend so far. This unit is part of a two-pronged approch to get rid of our Dish Network service and eliminate the need for any subscription (Dish/DirecTV/Comcast/etc). And for a steep cost of $60-$80 for satellite television, I could still purchase my wife's favorite show (Deperate Housewives) at a fraction of the cost....even with Apple's expensive prices at the iTunes store. $1.99 a show is $7.95-$9.95 a month. Or for free with an ATSC Over The Air tuner.

[/tv] permanent link

Wed, 23 May 2007

A "Podcast" Before iPods

I used to operate, believe it or not, a weekly "internet radio show" back in 1998/1999. It was called "Amiga Radio News". Sadly, the entire show was lost to the ages, as the files lived on long lost hard drives and websites that no longer exist. I can't even remember how long the show ran for, but eventually I must have found a girlfriend or something and I stopped.

The deep, dark secret of this show is that I might have produced maybe one or two episodes on an actual Amiga computer. The rest was on the PC as it had much better audio editing software (Remember Cool Edit Pro?), a faster CPU for MP3 encoding, etc. Oh well -- nobody really knew.

By chance, i ran across a lonely GSM encoded file and its ADPCM counterpart. Quicktime actually played the GSM file. So maybe you will be able to listen to it too. Some really funky stuff happens when you play the ADPCM file in quicktime, so unless you got something weird that will play it, dont bother.

Amiga Radio News - March 16, 1999 (GSM 6.10) [Right Click and Save]
Amiga Radio News - March 16, 1999 (ADPCM!!) [Right Click and Save]

When I saved these files on my mac, it saved them as arn3161999.gsm.txt. Rename it to .gsm, and double click it. It should open.

Now, if someone has additional shows sitting around...please contact me.

I really doubt I could take credit for the first podcast, as i am sure there have been other weekly "radio" shows off downloadable offline content, but boy was it ahead of its time.

[/podcast] permanent link