My Apple TV Solution

I don’t really like hacking Apple products. They work very well as they were intended. I’m pretty happy to let that be. I’ll hack other things, but it seems to go against the point of buying anything by Apple. It’s supposed to be simple by design.

I’ve thought about getting an Apple TV for a while. Two problems though. 1. A little bit more expensive than I’d like it to be. 2. It doesn’t play the video formats I’d like it to. So what to do? Well, I could just suck it up, pay that little extra money. Then I’ve got a device that plays everything off of my iTunes library. But seriously, I don’t watch any videos except for podcasts in iTunes. I keep my video files in DiVX format. So I my next option, if I want to watch anything besides podcasts is to either convert those files, or hack my Apple TV. Neither sounds that appealing.

My solution? I’m not gonna go with Apple for this one. How about just getting a DVD player that can play DiVX. Especially one that can play files off of a USB Flash Drive. Like say the Philips DVP5960. Add on to that a 4GB flash drive, so you have a play to put some of those videos. Total price: $88.98 Beats the hell out of $299 and a lot of extra work…