Hacking the AppleTV to make it ostensibly better has long been an underground hobby of mine. I upgraded my hard drive and tried to add plug-ins but this may be the holy grail of ATV mods. Boxee basically adds full media center capabilities to Steve’s box and turns the old menu into something glorious to behold.
Installing Boxee isn’t easy. You need to boot the install from a USB drive and hope for the best. However, once it’s up and running you have social media functions – playlist sharing, for example – and the ability to bring in desktop and online media onto your TV. You can also add services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr.
While Apple doesn’t condone this behavior, you can also install Boxee on other devices like media center PCs. It uses XBMC, a homebrew media center system to make everything look wonderful.