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Comment by mjg59 | Hacker News Reader

Nobody's broken the AppleTV v3 yet, despite v2s going for well above original sale price on Ebay due to their hackability. Sometimes the difficulty/payoff ratio isn't sufficient for anyone to find a flaw.

(Or maybe everyone who could produce a jailbreak for the v3s is engaged in a lucrative business selling v2s on Ebay)

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The reason the Apple TV 3 hasn't been jailbroken is because it provides a tiny attack surface. There's no web browser to exploit, and there's no iTunes syncing. So even when exploits have been found in various parts of iOS, most of those parts either don't exist or inaccessible on the Apple TV.

As chpwn, are you still involved in the jailbreak community?

(btw sent from the news:yc app).

I understand the desire to hack and tweak. That said, for my household, AppleTV is about the wife and I being able to watch Netflix, homeshare pictures and (more important) movies with minimal hassle.

Hadn't realized AppleTV v2 had a market. Tempted to upgrade and make some cash.

Jailbreak, install XBMC and use your iPhone/iPad as a remote. You can thank me later.

So, for a very long time, I had an XBMC box setup on my projector, got a AppleTV, pretty quickly stopped using the XBMC machine, and now I've since repurposed the machine as a Steam Big Picture box, (Which sadly won't run on an XBMC Apple TV)

Out of curiosity, what functionality in XBMC do you find particularly worthwhile?

Wider format compatibility - ATV doesn't support AVI, and won't play direct from either UPNP or SMB.

That's a fine reason.

mkv?

Thanks for letting us know! They're going for $164+ on Amazon.com (my selling venue of choice -- eBay is too much trouble).

Looks like I'll get an upgrade and extra cash for my v2, as I'm not interested in hacking.

A shame too, because AppleTV 3 is a beautiful piece of hardware. Would be the ideal tiny ARM server if only I could get Linux to run on it.

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