Apple TV Hacking: hackers, grooveshark, Bluetooth stack

Family responsibilities have kept me from posting about many amazing developments going on in the Apple TV hacking community this past week but I assure you that things continue to move ahead quickly and in promising directions. Brian Chen wrote up a great summary of this effort over at Wired. This week has brought forth several new system enhancements including NitoTV enhancements and the recently-introduced Plex module that can be installed to the system menu.

There's more to come. The first alpha of the Apple TV grooveshark client has been written as a collaboration between NitoTV developer Kevin Bradley and @hackfrag, as shown in the video embedded below. Grooveshark provides peer-recommended music streaming as well as Pandora-like playlist generation. It's yet another exciting Apple TV add-on in its new iOS incarnation.

In addition, there's quite a lot of work under the hood (i.e. software enhancements without direct Apple TV menu interaction) that's under development. TUAW friend Matthias Ringwald recently took a road trip (well, an air-trip followed by a car ride) to California, where he collaborated with iPhone developer "Optimo" and Jay "saurik" Freeman in bringing his Bluetooth stack software BTstack to Apple TV. Ringwald reports that he's worked out how to perform key injection on the Apple TV, and a demo video follows.