Macworld: First Look: Hacking Apple TV
Macworld: First Look: Hacking Apple TV
Good overview of the available hacks & mods. New stuff:
Interesting discoveries
Like the iPod, the Apple TV%u2014specifically, its included Apple Remote%u2014has special button combinations for accessing various %u201Chidden%u201D features. For example, pressing Menu and Up ( ) simultaneously, for approximately six seconds, will cycle through possible display resolutions. Even more interesting, pressing Menu and Down (-) will bring up the Apple TV Recovery screen, which gives you options to Restart, Run Diagnostics, or perform a Factory Restore. (The latter tells me that one of the Apple TV%u2019s hard drive partitions%u2014the drive has several%u2014contains a copy of OS X and the Apple TV software; restoring the unit restores the Apple TV, from this partition, to an out-of-the-box configuration.)
It also turns out that, Apple%u2019s statement notwithstanding, connecting a keyboard to the Apple TV%u2019s USB port does do something. Specifically, you can boot the Apple TV into single-user mode by holding down Command S at startup%u2014you can%u2019t do much from there, but it%u2019s still interesting%u2014and you can enable Verbose startup mode by holding down Command V at startup."
Also includes list and links of the known hacks and summaries of progress on some of the forums like AwkwardTV and Something Awful (and how did the SA guys become the Go To place for this topic? Not their usual genre it would seem!).
-mike
