Thanks to PARA9 it’s now possible to browse DVDpedia movie catalog on Apple TV. This small Montréal based team, specializing in web and Mac OS X development, released DVDpedia plugin for Front Row that now also supports Apple TV 2.4 (and only this version).

The plugin is offered as a free download.

To install it on Apple TV you need to enable at least SSH and AFP (if your device isn’t hacked yet) – find the instructions here. Then just copy the plugin from the Front Row library to Apple TV, make your DVDpedia database accessible from Apple TV, reboot the device and then make DVDpedia desktop application open the database at the new location.

The plugin enables to browse movies by Title, Director, Actor, Genre, Year, Country or Recently Added. You will also get a little info for each entry selected. And if you have a movie linked to the entry, you can start playing it right there in Front Row.

For more details and download links go to PARA9 website.

The latest NitoTV Take 2 version improves Gesture Support in MPlayer and DVD Playback, fixes various bugs and adds subtitle size toggle for MPlayer.

What’s exactly new in 0.7.9?

· Fixed gesture issues in DVDPlayback and MPlayer playback. The “options” button in the remote app is mapped to “hold menu” for changing between keymaps in DVD and MPlayer playback.

· Fixed Smart Installer bug for DVDPlayback framework stub not being moved if update was preformed rather than a restore.

· Fixed one crash bug in adding suffixes, blacklist volumes or MPlayer arguments (there is still another elusive bug that casuses some crashes there).

· Fixed another file browsing crash bug.

· Added subtitle size toggle for MPlayer (only works to toggle between the default fonts installed with nitoTV, Arial-14 – Arial-24). As dafranca noticed on Hackint0sh.org forum  – “This will help many foreign speakers, because the default font size was Arial-14 (kind of very small), and to to changed it has required same knowledge on shell”.

Find the 0.7.9 AppleTV version here

Follow the discussion about the latest NitoTV’s releases at Hackint0sh.org

And in case if you have never had an opportunity to read this article:

nitoTV – one plugin to rule them all

Source and more at AwkwardTV.org

Our plugin allows to setup any period of time between 2 slides in the “Slideshow” screensaver mode of AppleTV. The time can be set up in 1 second steps from 1 second to 9999 hours. The standard Apple TV application cripples the slideshow mode and only allows 2,3,5,10 or 20 seconds of time between 2 slides, which is not really usable for displaying digital art. Our ATVDigiframe plugin integrates seamlessly and matches the minimalist style of the AppleTV UI.

They idea came from a photographer willing to have a nice solution to display photos, non satisfied with the current solutions

I’am a huge AppleTV fan and I am a photographer myself. Before buying an AppleTV, I had looked into digital picture frames to display my own photographs. But they were either too small or they were really expensive when they had a nice size.
Also using an iMac mounted on the wall is a rather expensive solution. So I came up with the idea to use AppleTV as my own digital picture frame. However there are limitations on the AppleTV software that do not allow to use the slideshow function in a practical way.
So I decided that a piece of software has to do the job and allow people to share their photographs with their loved ones without having to be crammed in front of a computer screen. These days many people have nice Plasma and LCD TV’s so why not use their already existing “picture frames”? This is how the idea was born.

The company is base in Montreal Canada, and is providing the installation as a service for $78.91 or you can purchase an appleTV with the plugin already installed. They also allow you to download trial version (here) of the software. Cost for registering the plugin is $59.99

You can download the plugin for free and use it as long as you want. The trial version has the same features as the full version, but has a limitation regarding the time between the slides. The trial version is restricted to durations of up to 2 minutes between two slides. To remove this limitation, you need to purchase a registration key.

It looks like a simple feature, but it could be quite useful.

What do you think ?

More info at: http://atvdigiframe.blogspot.com/

Update:

We have received an email from ATVDigiframe developers, informing us that after the feedback of the AppleTvHacks.net comunity about the price, they have decided to reduce the price. Here you have the message.

We received quite a few emails from prospects who felt that the price point of 59.99 USD for the downloadable plugin is too high, especially in these rather harsh economic conditions.
Therefore we adjusted our prices for the download as well as for the on-site installation.
The registration code for the download version is now only 29.99 USD and the installation on an AppleTV device is only 59.99 USD (plus shipping costs) !

Boxee will play any non-DRM content, and let users share information with each other and their existing social networks about what they’re watching or listening to. It will also aggregate all your entertainment (video, music, images) into one place and add in any RSS/XML/MMS feed (with mainstream content from sites like Hulu & ABC coming soon).

You can read more about Boxee in this article, or watch the video below.

The installation is very simple, thanks to an installer which formats a USB drive and sets it up to do the installation for you once plugged into your Apple TV.

If you would like to get an invite to the Boxee alpha, simply follow this link http://www.boxee.tv/atvhacks. You can then grab the USB-drive installer software from here.

This version is comes with ssh, bin tools, and two plugins (XBMC for Mac and Boxee for Mac). That’s right, two full blown OSX applications with their own AppleTV plugin to launch and get updates.

Currently, it is only available to run on OS X, but Linux and Windows versions should be following within the week.

Download it http://atvusb-creator.googlecode.com.

Did somebody not just ask me if Jaman TV was available for Apple TV Take 2?  Well, I guess, the answer is “yes”.

Jaman just informed me a few days back that the Jaman TV plugin is now available for Apple TV Take 2.  I played around with it and am happy to report that it works flawlessly on my updated Apple TV.

As far as I know, there are no new features.  Just the ability to work with the new Apple TV 2.0 software.

The Patchstick zip file is available for download here.   You can refer to the original Jaman TV post (located here) for installation instructions and how to use the player.

Thanks, Brandon.

• Couch Surfer 0.2 for Apple TV 1.1
• Couch Surfer 0.2 for Apple TV 2.0
• Couch Surfer 0.2 Core Files for Apple TV 1.1
• Couch Surfer 0.2 Core Files for Apple TV 2.0
• Web kit Frameworks

Let me know how it goes. Just got the files from Brandon. I haven’t even installed it yet.

The files are listed below.  Download away!

• Couch Surfer Installer for Apple TV 1.1
• Couch Surfer Installer for Apple TV 2.0
• Couch Surfer Core Files for Apple TV 1.1
• Couch Surfer Core Files for Apple TV 2.0

Even more love from Brandon.

He has just updated Safari HD with the ability to access http password protected sites. So for those of you that have already downloaded the previous version, try again.

The URLs are still the same:

• Safari HD Installer for version 1.1
• Safari HD Installer for version 2.0
• Safari HD 1.1 core files

Now go and get some sleep, Brandon. Don’t tire yourself out.

[Update] All links removed to comply with Apple’s lawyers requests.