I’ve finally started to make progress on building a media center along the lines of what I want. My ideal solution always revolved around a media center that could handle Live TV and DVR duties as well as play music and video from a variety of sources on my home network but I finally decided to take a first step and ignore the Live TV/DVR aspect for now. I do have a TiVo after all. Plus, the solution I found can be updated later on when I do take that next step.

Apple released the AppleTV awhile back and while the interface and ease of use make it a great little device, the limited scope of functions that Apple provides greatly hampers its usefulness. It essentially has to sync to an iTunes library for video and music while integration with online video is essentially limited to just YouTube. Boring… especially for $200-$300. However, one interesting observation was the ease with which the AppleTV could be hacked and modified.

In the meantime, XMBC came along and decided to shift their development from the (original) XBox only to a general solution that can run on any platform including Linux and OS X. That instantly converted them from pointless to intriguing and I’ve been following them as they’ve developed the software. I also started watching for updates to Boxee, a platform built on top of XBMC specifically for OS X. There is also a working MythTV “front-end” solution for down the road when I start incorporating LiveTV & DVR functionality into the mix.

Recently a convergence occurred that sparked my first real step to getting the media center I want. XMBC and Boxee were ported to run on a hacked AppleTV (it runs OSX after all) and someone created an all-in one AppleTV hack + XBMC/Boxee installer. After some research, I took the plunge and picked up an AppleTV shortly before I left for Vegas last week. A couple of incompatible USB thumbdrives later and I had a hacked AppleTV ready to go.

After messing with it for a couple of days, the hacked AppleTV has lived up to its billing. Despite it’s alpha status, Boxee has really impressed. All of my media sources are brought in over the network and it uses IMDB to generate a pretty slick presentation of my video collection. I can still stream via iTunes as it doesn’t replace the AppleTV interface, just adds on to it. I can now pull media from any number of sources around the internet, not just YouTube. I also tried out PlayOn to stream my Netflix queue to my AppleTV over UPnP with some promising success. Forthcoming Hulu integration in XBMC and working Netflix and I’ll be set!