Hasta La Gadget!

It’s always a bit of a funny business paying for hacks, but Fire Core’s aTV Flash is a serious product and we can’t blame them for trying to make a buck off the back of it. Now the sequel, aTV Flash (black), is here in beta form, bringing a subset of the aTV Flash’s functionality to the brand new Apple TV, which runs that fancy new iOS-based 4.0 software. Most importantly, Fire Core brings a HTML5-compatible browser, but the Last.fm app and Plex Client are welcome tag alongs. “Coming soon” features include expanded media format support and networked storage support. The pre-order beta price is $20, while the final hack will retail for $30. For existing users, (black) is a free upgrade.

[Thanks, Gustavo]

aTV Flash (black) now in beta, ready to equip your new Apple TV with a browser originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s AirPlay, a new feature arriving with today’s release of iOS 4.2, marks a huge move into a (mercifully) wireless future, beaming music, videos, and photos to speakers and screens all over your house. Here’s why it’s so damn cool. More »

There’s something deep down inside of us that makes us want to believe Apple has some sort of app plan for Apple TV, and by “deep down inside” we mean “jailbreaking.” Fire Core, the people behind the aTV Flash software package for older Apple TVs, has just shown off its work on aTV Flash (black), a port of its hackery to the new Apple TV. Basically, aTV Flash converts your Apple TV into most of the interesting parts of the Boxee Box, and we’re particularly interested in the “Couch Surfer” browser aspect — at least as far as it can fend off encroaching jealousy for Boxee and Google TV. Unfortunately, the current version of aTV Flash costs $50, and while $50 + $100 is less than a Boxee Box, you don’t have to hack the Boxee to make it work. Hopefully Fire Core will reconsider that price by the time it launches aTV Flash (black), and in the meantime maybe some white knight hacker will get something like this working on Apple TVs gratis. Check out a video of the browser and Last.fm in action after the break.

Continue reading Jailbroken Apple TVs getting Last.fm and a browser, for a price

Jailbroken Apple TVs getting Last.fm and a browser, for a price originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We love us some big fancy grown-up consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360, but ever since we saw the new Apple TV we’ve been wondering what would happen if Apple gave it the App Store and let developers go wild. Surely the results would look a lot like the video above. The developers of The Incident are showing off the upcoming 1.3 build of their ultra-addictive falling objects platformer, which allows for an iPhone to control the game while it’s running on an iPad, which is in turn outputting video to the TV. Of course, The Incident guys aren’t the first to think of this, we actually saw an SNES emulator running on a jailbroken iPad months ago, and plenty of other apps use the iPhone as a controller. Still, it’s some pretty great execution, and the iPad video out seems to be key. Still seem tame to you? Imagine the OnLive iPhone app up and running on this thing. Mind = blown, right? Right.

New version of The Incident offers glimpse of world where Apple TV is the console, iPhone is the controller originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Forget about installing a bunch of iOS apps that are designed for touch-screens. What you really want to do with your jailbroken AppleTV is to turn it into a proper media-center. That’s just what hacker Quiqueck has done, installing the OSX and iOS app Plex onto Apple’s diminutive media box.

Plex is a client and server app for organizing and watching movies. You keep the media on your Mac, and then watch it there, or streamed to your iDevice. Thanks to Quiqueck’s efforts, Plex now works as a (still rather janky) plugin for the new AppleTV, adding an extra section – Plex – to the AppleTV’s top-level menu. From here you can browse and watch any video you have in your Plex library.

But so what? You can already stream from your Mac to your AppleTV, right? Sure, but with Plex you can watch pretty much any format of video, including stuff you have ripped or downloaded into formats not natively supported by iOs.

The hack isn’t straight plug-and-play. You’ll need to get your hands dirty in the terminal to get things working, and there are still some kinks in the UI, and you can’t yet stream music or watch an image slideshow, but those are just details. The $99 AppleTV just got a whole lot more useful.

Plex Client for Apple TV (2G) [Plex Forums]

See Also:

• AppleTV Jailbroken, Ready for Apps
• Rebellious Coders Home In on Apple TV Hacks, App Store
• Video: AppleTV Already Jailbroken