Scargill

Some time ago, I took my (then) Apple iPhone 3GS and jail-broke it. Why? Because I could and because I was sick of Orange trying to charge £10 a month for letting me share the 3G connection with my laptop.

That’s all history now, Orange have been kicked into touch in favour of the vastly superior THREE company and I now share unlimited 3G with my various devices.. When I moved up to the iPhone 4 I really could not see the point of jailbreaking the phone – but the Apple TV2 is different.  One of the biggest uses for Apple TV is to watch movies and guess what – you’re stuck with iTunes on your PC and Apple format movies.

Neither of the above is a problem for me – but converting movies to Apple format is not something your average person has much time for (couple of hours per video)… and so I took the plunge and had the thing jailbroken using the latest Sn0wbreeze (yup, that is spelled correctly).

The process is easy enough and takes a matter of half an hour including setup but the results are spectacular. Now I can watch movies and listen to music in a variety of formats. Not only that but I also have access to a NetGear ReadyNas Duo, an inexpensive and rather neat network backup device which just happens to be able to stream to the Apple TV – which means no more need to leave a computer on to access movies, pictures and music on the Apple TV. Between the low cost of Apple TV2 (sub-£100) and the Duo ~(sub-£100 excluding disks) – and the nature of the Duo which means with 2 disks you have redundancy (both store identical content – so if one disk goes down you continue on as normal) I now have a reliable solution for handling media at home without using a PC and without lengthy media conversion to suit Apple. It just so happens that software is available for both iPad and iPhone to handle this scenario also.

So is it worth jailbreaking the Apple TV2?  Most definitely – but if it turns your box into a stone – you are of course on your own – follow the Sn0wbreeze instructions carefully.