i'm in Zh-CN
the old apple tv(40G) is RMB 2880 more than $299 in other location
and the most video format we can find in Zh-CN is RMVB & DVDRip(Xvid)

although run mac os x is very complex to mainstream people

i wander if it can run windows xp pro ,then we can easy play most kind of media.

Confucius say:
AppleTV no have BIOS, so run Windows it cannot....

bootcamp it may run......

Originally Posted by vriesfde

bootcamp it may run......

nope.......

Originally Posted by SummerSoFar

nope.......

before apple relese boot camp same people run win XP on imac
so it must be not imposible

Hey guys, Bootcamp is just a front end & script app to prepare a disk/partition to receive Windows.

The EFI in the Mac is responsible to boot a MSdos (Fat32 or NTFS) partition as it has a primitive Bios emulation/wrapper built in.

Why would you run Windows XP... It's just sh**

Go for OS X !

If you just want to play specific video formats, OS X should suit you just fine.

Bootcamp is not just a frontend. Afaik my macbook pro didn't have that module in the first place. But the bootcamp version for tiger systems installed the bios module for efi. More infos: http://refit.sourceforge.net/myths/

The first problem is, to get this efi update installed (via software update?). Maybe there is a sanity check. Mind that the efi from a normal mac is different to that the ATV has.


The second problem is that there are no drivers for winxp.

Someone could try to install winxp fia XOM (WinXPonMac) - http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/HOWTO.


ash

Actually, I think I could get winXP booted if I had a protected mode pc/video bios emulator. That's non-EFI as you can't get control at the EFI layer (boot.efi is signed and efi firmware checks). There was a lot of work done regarding this in the early MacMini days and the whole OS X on x86 development before PC EFI was created.

But the source code for the tools and emulators were never posted so I can't extend this effort toward the AppleTV. That's the big problem with all the secret/private source code, it never gets used to support other projects and if you are not in the club and know the secret handshake too bad.

Also, with the recent AppleTV r2 update, the firmware was updated. This means that one does not have to extract it from hardware, it's in the update. I've been able to extract the EFI firmware from the capsule package but I'm lacking yet more tools to extract the individual bits to figure out what's going on at the EFI level. Right now, I don't have the time to create my own tools, I'm too busy in other AppleTV related projects and creating tools will have to wait until later.

This is what I have so far, a custom bootloader that handles Linux boot using a non-EFI enabled kernel with nvidia xvmc support for accelerated mpeg2 decode. That means I can decode and display 1080i mpeg2 content.