My AppleTV's hard drive has started failing on me. It's time to make a decision.

In practice, we mostly use the AppleTV to get music from Pandora (we run Boxee on our AppleTV, which coexists nicely with the normal AppleTV system). We occasionally use the AppleTV to access our music library, on the Mac upstairs, via Apple's various walled-garden services (iPhone Remote, etc.). When I download the occasional video from BitTorrent (mostly Top Gear), I stream it through Boxee.

Option #1: buy a new laptop-class hard drive ($60-ish) along with a PATA/USB adapter ($15-ish) and then clone my old hard drive to the new one. Given how hot the AppleTV runs, I'd appreciate advice on whether any laptop hard drives might have particularly lower heat output. (Link for posterity: template for getting at the screws without removing the rubber foot.)

Option #2: wait for the Boxee Box to come out.

Option #3: buy some other sort of set-top media box like a Popcorn Hour.

Option #4: wait to see if TiVo's new software magically turns my current TiVo HD into a decent streaming box. I originally got the AppleTV because I was unsatisfied with the TiVo's ability to do much of anything over the network, but TiVo has announced Pandora support "in the coming months", which might well work.

A buddy of mine has the Popcorn Hour and loves it, particularly with it's ability to play ripped Blu-ray. I'm okay, for the moment, with playing my BD discs in my BD player, but ripping is definitely a longer-term goal.

The Boxee Box is attractive, since I mostly use my AppleTV to run Boxee, and the Boxee Box would support 1080i and 1080p, which the AppleTV can't handle. (Well, if I transcoded the video just exactly so, then maybe it would work, but at that point, I could also transcode for the TiVo.) I imagine the Boxee Box will be cheaper than a Popcorn Hour. It might even support Blu-ray playback at some point. The hardware should certainly be fast enough.

So... any thoughts on these different options?

Popcorn Hour +1
The interface sucks, but it's never failed to play anything I've tried on it. 1080p is not a problem on this thing.

You might want to wait for the new version they have coming out. I think it's called the PopBox or something. If you come into Austin for some reason you can stop by and check out my Popcorn Hour.

Actually, just read that you already know someone with one. The offer still stands, but it probably wouldn't mean as much, now.

The Western Digital drives do seem to run really cool.
Except for the huge capacity versions, which sport an extra (friction/heat generating) platter.

Cheers

I vote Boxee Box, but that might just come from my own desires.

I think the AppleTV is really nice, and better than it gets credit for in the tech press, but Apple has limited it so greatly that, despite what others on this board have said, it is only good for Apple's walled garden, as you alluded to.


Exactly. Actually, it's FAR easier to get content to play on the Tivo than the AppleTV. Harder for initial setup, but once you get going it's easy. I was running pyTivo for a couple years to get HD media files (yes, from torrents) onto my Tivo. pyTivo can transcode video files of almost any type and quality on the fly and transfer it to the Tivo.

The reason I gave up on that is because transcoding is messy and unreliable. Instead I got a WDTV Live, and that has been better, but not great. I'm very excited to get the Boxee Box.

It sounds like you'd be best off with Boxee, especially since you use it already. Plus, it'll have the best input device of any of these devices. I can't wait to get my hands on that remote. I hope it's not cheap like every single other remote that's come with set-top streamers.

Besides, if you're going to have to spend $75, I say just go all the way

$80 for a new hard drive. (The smallest PATA laptop hard drive at Fry's, a Western Digital 250GB.)

$25 for a USB/PATA or SATA adapter.

$6 for a set of small Torx drivers.

Two attempts to do the transfer from the old disk to the new disk with the flakey, crashing AtvCloner tool.

After all that, what showed up was basically a brand-new, fresh AppleTV with the huge new hard drive. I had to resync the content from my iTunes (no big deal), and amazingly the patchstick hack survived the process. I'm still a little bummed because my total expenditure here is pretty much half the cost of a brand-new Boxee Box ("under $200", they claim), but you can't buy it today...

Any idea if it can also play ripped HD-DVDs?

I imagine it can handle the video. No idea about the menus and whatnot.

Ripped to what? It does mount .iso images to play dvds, I haven't tried with BluRay or HD-DVD images, though. If it's just ripped to a mkv then I can say that it will play it. I suppose there's an upper limit to the content it will play, but I haven't hit it.

I was thinking specifically about menus and whatnot.

I don't actually know of anything that does HDDVD menus specifically. However, a number of products, including SageTV's HD200 box do handle DVD and BluRay menus. Of course I don't recommend that box for stand-alone use. Clumsy/awkward UI for that.

It's definitely a lot faster/convenient to rip movies wholesale, including menus, but it does of course take up more drive space if you don't pare down the extras and fluff.

Maybe once those fabled and long overdue 3TB drives finally come to market things will start looking more capacious for my cinema collection... I've ripped a number of DVDs, but the vast majority of my collection is still sitting only on silver discs. Kind of hard to play them back when I don't have a DVD player connected to a TV anywhere in the house at the moment.

Now that I think about it some more, I guess it's not really menus I'm interested in, but captioning, alternate audio tracks (read "commentary"), etc.

That stuff is easier to maintain when ripping, transcoding and packaging into something like a Matroska file. The audio tracks are as simple as the video and the sub-titles are potentially a bit more complicated depending on whether you want to OCR graphical titles or just include the graphical elements and timecode indexes.

I've only ever personally done this for DVD so far.