Chumby Ordered…

I woke this morning to something that sounded like an off-tune radio station: it was my Philips alarm clock trying to emulate the sounds of the  ocean.  I think it tried the ‘gentle wake’ but I didn’t hear it until it sufficiently annoyed me.  This is going back in the back and back to Target next weekend (unless the xMas return lines are still long).  If Philips eventually releases a firmware update that allows MP3 music I may re-consider this purchase.

Why wait until next weekend to return?  I ordered a Chumby today and it is 3-5 days until it is delivered; I will need an alarm clock until then.

I ordered the Black Chumby and this was placed on order #4109- so I guess they have managed to sell a few thousand of these guys so far…

Apple TV Final Verdict

This morning I was finally able to access SMB shares and test the Apple TV for HD capacity; it choked on 720P MKV files and could not even load 1080i MKV files…  A little research showed the CPU in the unit is a Pentium M 1GHz and the unit packs 256MB of DDR2 RAM… Some people are saying this is fine for 500MB MKV files (I am assuming VERY lot bit rate movies?) but a 4GB – 8GB file (the size of most 120min 720p movies) just won’t go…

However, during the process I learned a bit more UNIX:

EXTRACT AN APPLE ‘PAX’ FILE:
pax -r -z -f Archive.pax.gz

INSTALL KEXTLOAD:
sudo mount -uw /
sudo touch /.readwrite
sudo sync

<reboot>

sudo rm /.readwrite
sudo sync
sudo mount -ur /
chmod +x /sbin/turbo_kext_enabler.bin
sudo /sbin/turbo_kext_enabler.bin
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext

INSTALL SMBFS:
sudo cp -R /Users/frontrow/Downloads/os/System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
sudo cp /Users/frontrow/Downloads/os/sbin/mount_smbfs /sbin/mount_smbfs
sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
sudo chmod +x /sbin/mount_smbfs
sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
sudo chown root:wheel /sbin/mount_smbfs
mkdir /Users/frontrow/Movies/movies
mkdir /Users/frontrow/Movies/videos
mkdir /Users/frontrow/Movies/hd
mkdir /Users/frontrow/Movies/extracts
sudo mount_smbfs “//user:password@192.168.10.106/movies” /Users/frontrow/Movies/movies
sudo mount_smbfs “//user:password192.168.10.106/videos” /Users/frontrow/Movies/movies
sudo mount_smbfs “//user:password@192.168.10.106/HD” /Users/frontrow/Movies/hd
sudo mount_smbfs “//user:password@192.168.10.100/Extracts” /Users/frontrow/Movies/extracts

INSTALL ATVLoader:
sudo mount -uw /
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns
cd AwkwardTV.frappliance/Contents/Resources
sudo chown root:wheel SetupHelper
sudo chmod 4555 SetupHelper
cd ~
sudo mount -ur /

INSTALL nitoTV:
sudo mount -uw /
sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/nitoTV.frappliance/
sudo chmod u+s /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/nitoTV.frappliance/Contents/Resources/nitoHelper

 

The Apple TV is great, but if it cannot play my 720p movies then it is not any more useful than my xBox running XMBC.  The Apple TV is a great appliance, but it seems to be designed for an ‘average Joe’ consumer that will not be pushing the unit to its limits- and I doubt that Apple will ever sell 720p high-bit rate HD movies on iTunes until the next generation of Apple TVs… 

I guess I will return the Apple TV to Fry’s tonight and pickup an xBox 360 (to play the copy of Halo 3 I picked up today).  I heard rumor it already has H.264 support and Microsoft is going to add XviD and DiVX support with the next update (or I can use TVersity to convert the files on the fly to WMV).