The AppleTV hacking community is still hard at work, doing everything from upgrading the hard drives in the AppleTV to updating the software, to changing the firmware so you can install a full version of Mac OS X on the AppleTV. It’s all pretty cool, and Apple hasn’t come out to squash the community that’s grown around modifying and making the most out of their new hit product.
Apple has, however, gone ahead and announced a couple of upgrades that will save AppleTV users some time and energy. AppleTVs with 160GB hard drives, in addition to the 40GB hard drives that came in the original AppleTVs, are now available in the Apple Store. But the hard drive upgrade was designed to give you more space and storage for all of your delicious audio and video, and more space for all of the add-ins and potential hacks that the community has developed for the AppleTV – that’s only part of the big news.
Steve Jobs announced that you’d soon see YouTube videos on the AppleTV. Services that do this, like TubeTV already exist, but the beauty of Job’s announcement wasn’t so much that you’d get flash on the AppleTV to support videos from YouTube webpages, but Apple and YouTube would partner to use H.264 video encoding, bringing high quality YouTube content to the AppleTV.
MacRumors believes that the massive transcoding of the YouTube video catalog will server two purposes; one, to prep the content for easy viewing on the iPhone, and second, to get YouTube to scan their entire video catalog to screen out the bad stuff. The iPhone and the iPod can both already play H.264 video, so it would be natural for YouTube to be available on those devices as the catalog becomes available.