[geeks] Mac World announcements...

[nate at portents.com]

> I have a question about them that i can't find anywhere, and therefore
> assume the answer is no.

Good assumption.

> Can you have it directly access a network share (nfs or smb, most likely)
> and play music from there?

No.

AppleTV uses x.509 certificates to authenticate to an iTunes server for
network playback.  So this even rules out using open-source iTunes media
servers such as Firefly Media Server:

http://fireflymediaserver.org/

> I suppose i should also state that i don't have much interest in hacking
> the apple tv to be able to do this, i would think that this would be
> functionality that would be built into the software.

You would need to hack the AppleTV.  It is just a 1.0GHz Intel Pentium
M-based Crofton CPU (based on an SSE2 Dothan model) with NVIDIA G72M
graphics with 64MB DDR2 memory and 256MB of 400MHz DDR2 running OS X off
either a 40GB or 160GB notebook hard drive.  A starting price of $229
isn't outrageous considering the hardware, but you could also build your
own set-top and do more with something like MythTV, but if you don't want
to make the effort, there are a number of other companies coming out with
products similar to AppleTV that will be more flexible in what type of
media they can play back... just expect a lousier interface, and a much
smaller (or non-existant) amount of commercial content you can purchase
for those other devices.

- Nate