So if you or someone you know wants to know more about iTunes and using it with your iPod, iPhone and Apple TV, this might be for you (or them).

It should now be available in London Drugs (I believe in store only) and for purchase online directly from MacVideoTraining.com with more retail stores coming soon. Apparently a few clips from my course are playing in a loop in London Drugs so if you hear me talking about iTunes while you’re checking out the computer department, don’t be alarmed.

I’ve got a few copies to give away so drop a comment below and tell me why you want a copy and I’ll pick the best ones and send it to you.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

You can easily install Boxee (and the excellent XBMC) onto your AppleTV without much trouble or voiding your warranty. All you need is a USB thumb drive. Just follow the steps here. Once you’ve installed it, you will need to run the updater in the Boxee/XBMC menu before running either Boxee or XBMC – at least I had to otherwise I’d get an error.

There is a fair bit of content available in Boxee.

Unfortunately, hulu doesn’t work from Canada so that’s a huge chunk of it’s content you can exclude.

Fortunately, there are lots of other things available:

An awesome bonus is the installation of XBMC which I’ve been using in some form since the original Xbox came out. Between these two apps, you should be able to play just about kind of media content on your AppleTV…not to mention, stream it from your local network (from say a network storage device) or the internet.

The project is a video training course called Quickstart to iTunes 8 which is geared towards people that want to fully utilize iTunes and all the devices that it works with like iPods, iPhones and even the AppleTV.

I’m in good company too…Derek is doing the Garageband course.

Last month we shot an introduction video for the course. It turned out better than I thought (still have trouble watching myself) and hopefully I don’t look as goofy as I felt while shooting it. Fortunately, the actual course only features my voice with iTunes providing the visuals.

I guess I can add ‘trainer’ to my resume now. I’ll post more details when the course is complete and ready for purchase….I’m sure some of this site’s audience could use the course as a stocking stuffer for a friend or relative.

Update: My course is in stores now!

The only thing really missing from it, that I’m able to do with my Xbox 360 is play back divx video, ideally over my network as I have a large media server – I could even do this on my original Xbox using the Xbox Media Center. So close yet so far….until now.

There has been a number of ways to hack the AppleTV to make it more useful. Some are free and others cost money.

One friend tried the free way….but there is a lot of reading and gathering of files to do it. He was never able to get it working properly so he gave up and just restored the Apple TV to it’s factory state and went on his divx-less way.

Then one company got a lot of press because they were selling a usb thumb drive with all the files needed to just plug-in and go. While reading up on this company, I was directed to a site that had a members only forum ($15/year) where all the same software could be found as well as installation guides. Both of these for-pay options have been criticized for charging for work created by others and offered freely. I’ll let you decide what’s right or wrong in this case, after all you are hacking something. It was just easier for me to get a packaged download that was tested than to wade through endless forum/wiki posts trying to track down all that was needed.

Watching this video is what finally sold me (it’s long):

Needless to say if you watched the whole video, I am now able to easily watch nearly any format of video on my AppleTV while still being able to revert it back to factory should I need to. I’m able to stream anything over my local network and so far the playback has been pretty much flawless. I have run into a couple of bad videos but they are flaky on other machines as well so I’m not too concerned about it. The software is a little on the beta side but there are updates available from within the tools installed which will hopefully stabilize things even more.

There are a number of other plugins available for installation on the AppleTV once this hack is up and running and I’m just starting to explore them – like the Couch Surfer web browser (webkit) shown above. You have full ftp/ssh access to the AppleTV. It reminds me of the early days of hacking the iPhone and is just as fun.

I can’t help but think how many more AppleTV’s would be sold if Apple at least offered divx playback natively on it. After all, Microsoft and Sony both allow it on their game consoles (for free), but of course this would crash head-on into their digital media strategy with the iTunes store.