I picked up an Apple TV tonight and I have to say that I’m pretty happy so far. The biggest issue I have with the thing is that it’s a pain in the cock to hack it without having another Mac. Actually it proves to be impossible.

The file system is hfsplus which the Linux kernel can read and write to as long as it’s not journaled but of course it’s journaled. So I copied over the data and reformatted it with hfsplus without journaling under Linux and copied the data back. OS X really doesn’t seem to like this so I had a $300 brick. I could have waited until morning and purchased a USB device to plug the drive into my MacBook but I had a better idea.

I could create an hfsplus journaled partition under Mac OS X on my laptop on a thumb drive that’s the exact same size (around 900MB) as the third partition on the Apple TV drive. Then I can copy the data over to the partition on my thumb drive via scp.

When I install the drive in my Linux box I can dd the partition on my thumb drive to the partition on the Apple TV drive. Since dd doesn’t give a fuck about partitions, Linux happily copies the correctly formatted data back onto the hard drive with the sshd binary installed giving me remote access to the Apple TV.

In the end if Linux could write to journaled hfsplus partitions or OS X didn’t crap out when Linux formats something then I wouldn’t even need another Mac.

It is a cool device though. If you have video, audio, and photo content on a machine that you want to view on your TV then this is $300 well spent. Setting on MythTV would be a lot more expensive with the hardware and not as slick as this tiny gadget.