Anyone using aTV Flash 4.0.2 or earlier?

[MacArtist]

I am seriously thinking about hacking my Apple TV. I would like to access a web browser to watch hulu.com. I would also like to hook up an external USB drive.

I visited this website:

http://www.atvflash.com/product_info.php?products_id=27

It seems like a nice package and opens up a lot of features.

Anybody here using it? I know people have run Patchstick without going through this company but this looks pretty easy and they provide software updates for their product.

What do you think?

[pinkoos]

Count me as one who's been eyeing this for awhile now as well, but have yet to "bite."

I did the Boxee hack awhile ago and it made my AppleTV pretty slow to repsond, etc., so I restored it back to Apple's homegrown goodness.

The website really does a good job at selling that thing, with all the reviews and such, but I'm just not ready to mess with the AppleTV again right now.

[pokari]

I haven't upgraded to the new version of AppleTV yet, but I have been using this product aTV Flash for almost a year now. It has been great. We can VERY easily watch whatever we have loaded on a hard drive that is hooked up via USB. It is just as fast as watching anything else off of the AppleTV internal HD. I do have to restart the ATV about once a month or so. All in all, I believe it to be a wonderful product.

[Gilbert]

I first used the ATV Flash program about a year ago. Pretty straightforward. That being said, I mainly use XBMC (Xbox Media Center) on the ATVs as my media center program of choice (http://xbmc.org) I migrated to ATVs coming from using XBMC on old Xbox units. The developers of XBMC for the Mac and AppleTV also have a patchstick available for free called the atvusb-creator.

http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

It also installs Boxee if one wants. ATV Flash is a bit more end-user friendly but both are using the same basic technology but if Apple breaks XBMC with an update, ATV Flash has to wait until the XBMC developers can fix it. So I have just chosen to go straight to the developer.

[Forrest]

I've used the free atvusb-creator on both my AppleTV's about a year ago - worked fine. If you go this route, note atvusb-creator is currently NOT compatible with AppleTV 3.x!

If you're looking for Hulu access - aTV Flash and atvusb-creator is NOT a good solution. Hulu ROUTINELY changes their streaming service so it's NOT compatible with AppleTV's and all other devices that is not a Windows, Mac or Linux computer. They've broken computability a few times with Boxee and the AppleTV web browser doesn't support Flash - so Hulu won't work.

[MacArtist]

Thanks for the info, guys!

I went ahead with purchasing ATV Flash. Running the patchstick on my AppleTV went without a hitch.

So far no Couch Surfer (web browser) but they're close to releasing a AppleTV 3.0 compliant version.

I like being able to plug in an external USB drive to store more movies and really like having access to a broader range of codecs.

Nice having ftp access to movie files from my MacPro. I can upload movies to the USB external drive instead of using sneaker.net.

Was it worth $50? I think so.

It might be that I won't be completely happy until I have an honest to goodness Mac based HTPC.

This might buy some time until then.