Modifying an Apple TV is really annoying. The information is all over the place and mostly conflicting >.<

Anybody else have one and is modifying it?

I don't have one, but I'm curious what you want to mod on it.

I've got one, but I'm not changing anything yet. My wife finally has a solution to hear all her music in the living room that she likes. If I mess this up, I'm in trouble. I'd love to stream FLAC to it, but for now I'm content with MP3s. Also after seeing the mess Apple made with the iPhone and third party software, I'm wary of changing anything.

http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/AppleTV/

Maybe this will work?

It's free! What kind of PC are you using and what are you converting? I have used these produces for conversion to iPod and it was much faster than that. It was way faster then Quicktime pro.

Odd, I had a reply, guess I ever actually hit submit.

Anyhow, Quicktime Pro should have a preset for Apple TV. Also, Handbrake is decent ( http://handbrake.m0k.org/ ), has presets and should work.

I'm guessing the reason why your initial attempt failed might have been either you had an H.264 profile selected that the Apple TV can't deal with *or too high of a bitrate. The lower end CPU in it has limits, much like any non PC device. I've had to research it a bit for encoding files to H.264 in an .mp4 container for the PS3 to play.

Handbrake sounds pretty snazzy, thanks. Just downloaded it for my Mac. I would guess that it will work fine on 10.5.

*edit*
It looks like Handbrake is really intended for DVDs. Any file I try fails, and the FAQ basically confirms this. I may use this app in the future (it didn't work on my machine in the past, so it's good that it installed this time at least), but for now I'm still looking...

Dragging this back to life for a bit!

With the iPhone app "Remote" you can control the Apple TV in ways that you can't (at least not very easily) via the Apple TV interface. Is there a program that can control the Apple TV via a MacBook like this?

Ideally I'd like be able to create playlists on the fly and add/append/encue songs like on the Empeg, but I know that will never happen. But for now just quicker searching and access to media would suffice.

I apologize, I don't know the answer to your question, but I feel I should address the first post in the thread, as my response is different now.

I recently upgraded my parents' AppleTV using the ATV Flash. It's essentially just a collection of the hacks that are already out there, but much more manageable. In the end all the real "hacking" is done for you.

The end result is that their AppleTV can now play most forms of video (pretty much anything MPlayer can play...which is pretty much anything), and I did a little post-hacking to enable external USB hard disk support, so we now have a 750GB hard drive in addition to the 40GB internal drive.

I'll try to remember to update when I experiment with DVD playback. I'm really interested in its capabilities in that area.

One note: I was hoping to be able to play back 720p MKV files that I've...obtained, but the AppleTV's hardware isn't powerful enough to decode it. It works flawlessly on your standard xvid files, though.

There is bad blood between the ATV Flash people and the actual authors of the software and procedures that it uses.

It isn't difficult to make your own patchstick if you have an Intel Mac. Follow the numerous guides available. If you want to blow $50 then donate it to one of the software authors or send it to your favourite charity.

Yeah, I'm aware of all that, but IMO, it's not at all as easy to cobble everything together as you say it is.

I'd gladly give the money to the authors if they'd send me a patchstick of their own. Sure, the fancy graphic at the top of the AwkwardTV wiki claims the same ease of use as the ATV Flash, but their wiki is unnavigable, and I couldn't see how to actually do that...

Kinda, sorta. The easiest thing to do is to use your AppleTV via AirTunes. You need to enable this on one of the menus. After that, your AppleTV shows up just like an Airport Express might, as one of your speaker options at the bottom right of the iTunes window. You can play anything, use playlists, etc. What you don't get is the swank on-screen display from the AppleTV.