The Apple TV Hard Drive Upgrade
- April 1st, 2007
- 11:39 PM (GMT-5)
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I knew there must have been a way to upgrade the hard drive on the Apple TV. After talking with Apple they stated that there was not a way. What they must have meant was there was not a non technological way to do it. Maybe that it was not easy for consumers to do on their own without proper knowledge.
Over at AppleTVHacks.net they have posted an How-To on upgrading your Apple TV hard drive. One thing they do mention though is that when choosing a drive you need to be thinking about the increase in heat and if you put a drive in that causes too much heat it will cause issues with the Apple TV.
I personally do not yet have an Apple TV but I do plan to get one, the main limitation was the size of the hard drive that made me think twice. The other limitation was that no one knew if the Apple TV would really support 5.1 surround sound. After talking with Apple they stated that iTunes and the Apple TV do in fact support 5.1 however the content that you download from iTunes is not encoded with 5.1 surround sound.
What I have chosen to do is gather up all of the DVD’s I own and use a program to encode the movies into an iTunes format using mp4 and h.264. The only issue so far is that there is a bug within iTunes that will not allow you to add meta data to a file that is encoded with 5.1 so you cannot have all of the fancy cover art. I am hoping that either iTunes fixes this problem or that the HandBrake developers find a work around for this. I would love to get the Apple TV and enjoy the 5.1 surround sound.
Now I have been told that encoding my DVD’s with HandBrake is against the law but I have also heard that it was not. I have no idea if it is or not nor do I care. I bought the DVD’s I shouldn’t have to buy the same thing from iTunes in a certain format when I have the ability to put it in that format from a source that I own.
