There's been quite the to-do (or, to-don't?) on forums about the AppleTV. There are a lot of people who hate Apple with a passion, and hate their grand success these past few years with an even greater passion. So when it looks like a new product line (the AppleTV) is a less than astounding device, they assault with all their nerdy, bitter forum-posting might.

To be fair, out of the box the AppleTV isn't a very spectacular device. Heck, we don't even have a video store in Canada, so out of the box it's fairly useless to me. The other day at the AllThingsD technology conference, Steve Jobs said that the AppleTV wasn't a business so much as it was a "hobby". That got me thinking: does he want us to hack this thing?

When I got my AppleTV several weeks ago I did several things. First, I installed a bigger hard drive in it; a not so simple process which involved removing the original drive, imaging it's OS volume, copying that onto the new drive, then installing that into the aTV. Then I got SSH working, so I could log into the system remotely. I installed all sorts of new QuickTime codecs. I got File Sharing turned on so I could drop files onto it remotely without having to go through iTunes (the normal method, which screens out files it believes the aTV can't play).

Most importantly, I got a plugin for aTV called, simply, ATVFiles. It just makes a new main menu which lists files stored in a certain location on the hard drive. So I can play whatever I want. For example: if I were, hypothetically speaking, itching to see season 3 of BattleStar Galactica, but found that the release date for the DVD set hadn't even announced yet, I'd be pretty upset. Now, let's say a friend of mine got a hold of high-quality rips of the HDTV broadcast of season 3. That would be pretty cool, except they're all in DiVX format. So instead of huddling around my laptop screen, Angela and I can... I mean, could just relax on the couch and watch those episodes on Jeff's big TV. Ahhhhh....

Also, at AllThingsD Steve announced that in the next couple of weeks there will be a software update that lets you view YouTube videos live from the interwebs. Admittedly, the quality won't be so great, but once again, it's better than 10 people huddling around one laptop screen.

So is the AppleTV the next, latest, greatest, end-all, be-all, PVR, DVR, HDTV appliance? No, but who cares? It's so much FUN...