bog

One of my favourite features of Apple TV is the integration with iTunes for syncing content. I primarily use iTunes for managing my music and videos, however I'm getting increasingly frustrated that iTunes wont help me manage all my videos (such as DivX) without some ugly workarounds. Now that I've patched my AppleTV to play DivX, I need an elegant solution for syncing DivX content to it.

I was considering starting a project to create an open source iTunes clone that would remove some of these restrictions and have a plugin architecture for the development of additional functionality. The great news is that I found just such a project at http://www.songbirdnest.com. This is a multi-platform media player and manager with a plugin architecture thats ripe for a plugin to be developed to sync with Apple TV.

1. How interested would others here be for such a tool?
2. What protocol do you think should be used for transferring data, Bonjour or SSH or something else?
3. Where do movies, music and photos reside when synced to Apple TV with iTunes?

B

ejsjrnc

1. this could be a very sweet tool. At this point, since you have to be relatively tech savvy in order to set up atv to play divx and other codecs, it's not a difficult thing to copy data to the device using established methods (SCP, AFP, enabling the ftp server on atv, etc), but I'd definitely welcome a all in one solution to handle file management as well as syncing.
2. I would think that whatever works for you system. I don't run a mac, so Bonjour is kinda out for me.
3. Movies, music and photos reside in the Media partition on the Atv when synced with itunes. It isn't very friendly to most of the file browsers currently available for the atv as it uses a database to track artist, track name, etc and just names the files with random strings.

bog

Thanks for the feedback.

I have discovered an existing plugin for Songbird for syncing content with an ipod. It includes some code to read and write the Media Library DB (on the ipod). This is the biggest challenge of syncing the content.

I think SFTP/SCP/SSH would be a a good start for transferring content. However, it also means the password is well known and could be easily modified by others on the same network.

I'm going to start by syncing content from Songbird to a local directory before I transfer it remotely.