Hacking an AppleTV to play any file type without Boxee or XBMC.

Posted by Bush Williams | Posted in Apple TV, Home Theater | Posted on 07-03-2010

*It is extremely important to be completely familiar with this material, the process, and the required software/resources needed to execute it properly before trying. As far as they go, this one is fairly long and complex. I have written this as simply as possible for someone who knows what they are doing. Remember that if at anytime you bork your AppleTV you can reboot it and hold MENU and – at the same time to do a factory restore*

What a typical day to take on a complex hacking project. I sat down, prepped, and put about an hour into this project. You know, just enough time to become fully committed when my kids begin bouncing between all out fighting as loud as they can and pounding on the piano. To add to the distraction, my wife needs me to help her move furniture so she can paint the laundry room, and in the midst of all of that, I screw up the hack and now my AppleTV boots into a black screen.

To recap progress thus far, the house is crazy and upside down, everyone needs something from me, and the AppleTV is FUBAR. Lets reset.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we used an Apple TV in our living room as the main source of on demand content. That is, until recently when I renovated our dining room into a Mac Mini driven Home Theater. Once the theater was complete, I found that the Apple TV in the living room began to slowly spiral into obsoleteness. Its not that we don’t watch TV in the living room anymore, its that we stopped watching downloaded content. Since AppleTV requires that all its content be MP4 and synced via an open iTunes library, I was previously converting every AVI/MKV/WMV/etc. etc. to MP4 before we could watch it. This was such a monumental pain in the ass that once we got Plex up and running on the Mac Mini, I just couldn’t bring myself to continue converting the content for the living room.

The goal of this post is to pass on the process I used to allow all other media containers rather than just quicktime to be played on an AppleTV without having to load Boxee and XBMC which simply do not perform on the AppleTVs hardware. Now, lets get dirty:

1.) Navigate to this website and download ATVUSBCREATOR http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

2.) Find yourself a USB Key (henceforth known as patch stick), back up any data you have on it as it will be erased, and run the program.

3.) You can unselect Boxee/XBMC at this point if you want, or install them. It doesn’t hurt to go ahead and load them up. I personally think they perform poorly on the AppleTV, but I encourage everyone to come to their own conclusions. We are mostly after the Software Menu and SSH tools.

4.) Now, run the patchstick creator, plug it into your AppleTV, and reboot. Once the loader is complete you need to pull the Patchstick out, and reboot the AppleTV one more time.

5.) You will notice now that your AppleTV is back online that the menu on the far left is “Software Menu” Browse over there and click on “3rd Party”. In the “3rd Party Menu” go down to “Check for Updates” and run it. After the update runs you should see a whole list of 3rd party plug ins. If not, see step 5a below, otherwise, at this point I am only installing “NitoTV”. There are also options to add Couch Surfer to surfing the web, and emulator program to play old console games, and many other plugs ins. There is also an option for ATVFiles, but I MUST WARN that both times I installed ATVFiles, my screen went black on the AppleTV after a reboot. I could hear the menu selections but the screen was black. The only way to fix this problem was to SSH to the Apple TV and remove the following directory via delete:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/ATVFiles.frappliance.
5a.) You ran the 3rd party sofware installer and didn’t have NitoTV appear. Click this link to go to the download page and get the direct download for AppleTVs latest build. The install instructions will be included in the download and simply require you to copy the contents of the download to the root of Users/frontrow on your AppleTV and then execute a terminal command to install it.

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/NitoTV_Take_2

6.) Okay, so your hacked with NitoTV running. Now its time to setup install the AFP server so that we can browse network shares and start watching custom content.

Of course, at this point, we have a little problem… we need to get AFP up and running on the AppleTV so we can browse out to network shares for our content and use our external HDDs via the USB cable. Here comes the painful part.
7.) At this point, if you have an AppleTV that was made prior to October 2007 (Version 1.0) your good. Skip to step 12 and give yourself a big thumbs up because your very fortunate. For the rest of us, your going to need to turn up an AppleTV 1.0 Image. I am not going into any details than that, but without that image, your not going to get AFP to work. The steps from this point assume you have the proper OS.DMG file.
8.) Alright now, its time for a touch of voodoo. SSH to your AppleTV. Your going to need its IP address and an SFTP client like Cyberduck. However, before we use the client, the Terminal will get us going. Open up Terminal and type in SSH frontrow@your.appletvs.IPaddress You will then be prompted for a password, again, type in frontrow at this point your in. Now to make a recovery.dmg file.
9.) From the terminal, copy this line: sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=recovery.dmg bs=1m
10.) With that done, open Cyberduck and create a connection to your AppleTV using the information we used in Step 8. Once connected, browse to the users/frontrow directory and drag the “Recovery.dmg” file to your desktop.
11.) Stay with me here, lets open up “Recovery.DMG” and find a file called “OS.DMG”. This file needs to be deleted, and the file you got from the internet needs to be put in its place. (may be necessary to rename the file to OS.DMG if it has some odd name like OS-DOT-DMG.dmg or something like that) with that complete, copy the modified Recovery.dmg to the /Users/Frontrow/Documents folder on the AppleTV via cyberduck and then head back to the AppleTV.
12.) From the AppleTV, browse over to NitoTV and then down to Settings. From there you want to find and run the “Smart Installer”. This will take a while, don’t fret. Once this is done, it may say “Failed… Partial install”, but disregard. Go ahead and reboot the AppleTV.
13.) At this point you are good to Share the folders you want your AppleTV to be able to access on your remote Mac and the got to NitoTV -> Network and setup access to them.
Now thats it, your AppleTV is streaming content from any of the popular containers without the need to run a cumbersome and poorly executed program like Boxee to do so.


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Creating an Apple Home Theater Part II: The Apple TV

Posted by Bush Williams | Posted in Apple TV, Home Theater, Mac | Posted on 26-07-2009

 The Apple TVPart I of our “Creating an Apple Home Theater” guide can be found here.  In this segment, we will explore the Apple TV as an option for someone who is looking for a simple solution to bring the iTunes Store and their own digital media to a television set near you. Sound interesting? Look no further than the Apple TV. This little media extenders primary function is to bring the iTunes storefront to your living room providing an easy way to rent or buy movies from your armchair. That being said, it also provides YouTube and Apple Movie Trailer access, as well as the ability to display FlickR, Mobile Me, or local photographs on the big screen. Regardless of if you want to rent War Games, pick up Cakes last album, or download last weeks episode of “The Big Bang Theory”, its all just a click away, right from the couch.

While it can not be denied that these features are convenient and easy to use, thats not why I bought an Apple TV. I have that DVD collection I spent a month ripping into video files and I want to stream them to the living room. How does that work? It all starts with a Mac running iTunes. (Windows machines will work as well, so if you must, I forgive you) All that needs to be done is to hook the Apple TV up to your set, connect it via built in wireless N or built in ethernet to your home network, and it will begin the initial setup. The last stage of setup will present you with a five digit PIN number. Once you have the PIN, launch iTunes on your computer and it will show that it has found a new Apple TV on the network. At this point the Apple TV appears in iTunes just like an iPhone or iPod would. You can now select, the media to sync to the Apple TV, be it movies, music, TV shows, pictures, or podcasts. Its worth clarifying that you will have full access to the entire contents of your iTunes library on the Apple TV. The items you choose to sync are simply copied to the Apple TV and are always available regardless of the host computer or ethernet availability. In short, you always have access to your synced items, where as the rest of your library is dependent on the host computer being on and connected. In fact, with such a small footprint, loading the Apple TV with your favorite movies and shows makes for a great companion to take in the car on long drives and double nice to have once you arrive at your destination.  Why fuss with DVDs in the car to keep the kids happy when you can just tote their favorite digital copies along?

To view all your recently ripped titles, use the included remote to browse down to “Movies” and then “My Movies” and you have access to all your titles, each sorted alphabetically by genre. Time to pop that popcorn. Keep in mind that you also have a choice of My Music, and My TV Shows as well.

Sounds easy right? Well, thats because it really couldn’t get more so.  It is worth mentioning that there are a few potential drawbacks to the Apple TV.  The Apple TV only displays 720P and 1080i resolution. Now if your like me and have an up converting HDMI port on your TV and haven’t forgotten that all of the source material we ripped was from a 480P DVD, this may or may not be a big deal.  I have to make a big footnote of this thought as I understand that I am sometimes the minority who is absolutely fine with 720P.  I could hardly tell the difference on my old 110″ projector, let alone my 46″ LCD but that is a can of worms for another time.  A minor drawback is once again the fact that this device will require connectivity to a computer with iTunes open and should this connection be lost, only your synced content is available.  Now perhaps the largest pain is that the Apple TV, without any hacks (oh yes, there are hacks) will only play Apple formatted video, specifically MP4 and M4V files.  A proper DVD ripper that can rip to an Apple TV friendly format will be required and if you already have a large library of AVI or MKV files, they are going to need to be converted.  Luckily the conversion process is easy and can be performed from a variety of different software, I myself prefer Quicktime Pro.  On average a two hour movie takes about thirty minutes and a half hour TV show takes 10 – 15 minutes to convert form an *.AVI file so its not too bad (our conversions were performed on a quad-core tower @2.6GHz).  As I recently mentioned, there is and easy way to add Boxee and XMBC to your Apple TV which adds Hulu, Comedy Central, support for many other file types, and many other sources of streamed content from the internet.  Keep in mind that Apple will release a firmware update for the Apple TV every now and then that breaks this feature but the community bounces back pretty fast with a new version. 

Now to wrap this entry with an example of how I am using the Apple TV in my home and highlight why I am so fond of it.  I have built this system over the last year and have found it to not only be rock solid and reliable but also, in terms of what I have built, very affordable.  I am currently using three Apple TVs at the house.  I have one in each of my girls bedrooms, and one in our living room.  I am using a Mac Mini as a home server which hosts our iTunes Library.  The Mini is attached to a Drobo that currently provides two terabytes of storage for my media collection.  In the year that I have been doing this, I have consolidated all of my media and currently have 900 TV shows, 600 DVDs, my home videos, 12,000 songs, and 4,000 photographs all available instantly on the Apple TV.  As a parent, I have to be always mindful of what my children are exposed to on the TV, and I definitely have a considerable collection of media that is above and beyond inappropriate for a two year old and a six year old.  The reason I like the Apple TVs in their bedroom is because I can provide them with all of their, yet none of my, content and all without fussing over parental controls.  Sure the parental control option is there, but I have found a great way to bypass it and make their experience even better.  By enabling the “Fast User Switch” function on the computer serving iTunes, you can run multiple instances of iTunes by logging in multiple user accounts on the Mac.  This allows me to have a “Master iTunes” account for the living room Apple TV to sync with that contains all of our content, and a “Girls iTunes” login who’s iTunes library only contains the shows that are appropriate for them.  This is fantastic because when they browse their Apple TV libraries, they can watch anything available without any concern on my part.

I find that the Apple TV is a simple solution for users of any level.  You can plug it up and it “just works” or you can hack it with Boxee and get gnarly with it, there are plenty of possibilities.  While speaking of possibilities for Apple Home Theater though, much like Skywalker, there is another.  If you absolutely want to create yourself something fully custom, without any limitations, and put the power of a full blow computer on your television set, the Apple TV just isn’t going to be for you.  If you want to take it to the next level with all the pro’s and con’s there in, the power user and control geek will want to fire up a Mac Mini Home Theater System and in our next segment, we will explore that option in detail.

The Apple TV comes standard with Wireless N, Gigabyte Ethernet, HDMI, Component Video, Optical Out, and a USB port.  The full tech specs can be found here at Apple’s Website.

 

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