AppleTV Runs iOS, Already Jailbroken | Hacker News Reader

AppleTV Runs iOS, Already Jailbroken

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41 pointsssclafani22 comments

A final word from Strafach: “The most interesting thing about the new AppleTV OS is that all binaries are marked iPad-compatible. I do wonder what Apple is planning…”

Curious indeed.

I bet they want to have almost anything that is possible on the AppleTV be possible on the iPad, but not the other way around.

I don't see how you could run apps on an AppleTV with no touch interface, different screen resolution, and no HD space. Am I missing something?

If it's hacked, people could write software that would interact with AppleTV's API's, namely the one that interfaces with the remote control.

It's already hacked according to Gizmodo. Now, if we could get 10.1 flash integration (meaning Frash) past beta 0.2 towards something useful we'd all be smiles.

Gruber had some interesting speculation on last week's episode of The Talk Show podcast.

I'm paraphrasing but he was essentially wondering aloud if, due to AirPlay capabilities, iPads and iPhones would be able to deliver content to the Apple TV . . . and then become a remote control for the content on the TV.

This could be video like the MLB app delivers, or other apps that would lend themselves to being shown on one (big) screen, and controlled on another (small) screen. Think: games.

All of this sounds very "Apple" to me, in that it's completely consistent with how they think about integrated solutions.

And if true, I'll buy an Apple TV for the first time.

A game with the action shown on the TV and the interface shown on an iPad would be awesome. Imagine the incredible UI ideas that would be possible if you had the entire screen as your canvas.

Reminds me of the Optimus Tactus keyboard concept: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/

Maybe re-release "You Don't Know Jack!" series with updated questions...or live interactive gameshows.

A game with the action shown on the TV and the interface shown on an iPad would be awesome.

I can imagine this becoming the preferred way of many to play Farmville.

Wow Gruber has a great theory. He thinks that the announced feature of Airplay will appear on the new AppleTV. Answer: ...yeah.

Inter-device compatibility will be complicated by having a new platform. But there will likely be a similarity between the iPad and the Apple TV. The AppleTV will be 1280x720 and the iPad is 1024x768.

At any rate, the touching will be through other IOS devices or possibly after-market controllers. But it's true, in general it won't make so much sense in terms of the binary on your iPad compared to the Apple TV.

The ecosystem is rich, but I'm not sure sure about about universal applications that can go from iPad to iPhone to AppleTV. For games you're going to have a lot of graphics slogging around for each version, and the app's size will suffer. You may also want to charge each separately.

> other apps that would lend themselves to being shown on one (big) screen, and controlled on another (small) screen. Think: games.

:) That's something I wanted to do way before AirPlay, by using the iOS device as a web-server of some sort and display the big screen part of the games through a web browser (on laptop, game console...). In particular, one idea was for games like Pictionary or Taboo: the small device is a controller as well as the private part of the game (with the hints).

However, I never implemented anything due to my lack of experience with iOS and the fact that it seemed that the game console web browsers were fairly limited... contact me if anyone would like to do something around that though, even if just for fun!

That is my speculation as well. I posted about it here a bit ago (whoa.. 26 days.. time flies!): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1657709

There is already SDK support for real-time video overlays (since iOS 3.2)

> Consider a movie player view to be an opaque structure. You can add your own custom subviews to layer content on top of the movie but you must never modify any of its existing subviews.

In addition to layering content on top of a movie, you can provide custom background content by adding subviews to the view in the backgroundView property.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/mediapl...

The apps would be written for a TV resolution, like 720p (1280x720), the same way apps were written for the iPad resolution. No one knows for sure if the AppleTV has flash or not, yet. The touch interface could be handled by the iPod/iPhone/iPad, i.e. you use them as a control to the TV.

I can just about guarantee you that Apple TV does not and will not have Flash.

I guess once there's a Jailbroken version of iOS 4.2 for iPad we will be able to put that theory to the test.

Check that: Someone already has the AppleTV software running on a Jailbroken iPod Touch [1]. Pretty neat.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2010/09/28/apple-tv-lowtide-front-row-ru...

Hopefully they can take key parts of the atv ios build and port it to an app for jailbroken ipod touches/iphones. Have it run like front row for OS X. That way you would only need one device and you could play back local media.

Doesn't this open the door to flashing the new AppleTV with an Android (or eventually even Debian) build?

Sure, but there are already a number of machines you can do that with. I'm sure there is some reason to do this, but I can't think of many good ones.

FWIW, Debian is probably even easier than Android (less specific hardware requirements.) However, AFAIK noone has developed a Linux kernel to run on Apple's A4 SoC, in either the iPad or AppleTV.

They would be a nifty cheap choice for a MythTV frontend (among other things), but AFAIK it would be quite significant development & reverse-engineering work for proper hardware support. As the other reply says, there are lots of similar options that run Linux (and presumably Android) right now.

It was already announced that it used the A4. So it would have been pretty crazy if it wasn't running a variant of iOS. But it's good news, I doubt there won't be an app store on it. But it is hard to tell how soon that will be. Maybe we'll have to just enjoy jailbroken apps first and then wait for Apple to announce the compatibility.

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