I couldn’t help myself! While I was at DigiLife buying my new iPod nano. I bought a 40G Apple TV too! Why only 40Gig you ask? I don’t really have any intention of using the internal hard disk to store media! Here’s what I went through when I got it home on Saturday evening:
Firstly, I video’d myself un-boxing it. Then I plugged it in via component cable to my widescreen CRT and chose 576p @ 50hz for the resolution. It fired up and was running in no time, connected to my iTunes, all very easy.
I downloaded the “patchstick” and created a USB bootable thumb drive. Stuck it in the ATV and rebooted. It did some trickery, rebooted and when it came back up it had a new menu in the main menu “AwkwardTV”. Excellent. I enabled SSH then proceeded to have some fun.
* note, I’ve not once opened up my Apple TV. You just don’t need to do it these days. Patchstick = awesome.
The Patchstick copied Perian to my ATV for me (codec to play divx, among other formats). I found that apple file sharing wasn’t working. My Apple TV came with version 1.1 of the software, with no easy way to revert back to the ideal version 1.0. Not to worry, some more tinkering and I had this baby cranking!
I needed to copy some files from my Macbook Pro 10.4.x install to the ATV to get some functionality back, like mounting afp shares over the network. Only, get this, 10.4.10 binaries will not work in the ATV’s kernel. I discovered that I had to download the 10.4.9combo updated from apple and extract some files from that! After many hours of goofing around and more downloads (turbo’s kext enabler) I had my ATV connecting to my other mac’s!
I also installed ATVFiles, and nitoTV to allow me to browse the network shares and play movies using quicktime or mplayer.
I carried out a few little other things as I discovered that I needed them, eg creating an /etc/rc.local with the kext enabler within so I was able to mount afp shares on boot. I might in the future modify the rc.local file to auto mount a machine/share upon boot up. Perhaps when I decide how I’m going to store all my movies.
So far so good, I love it, the youTube plugin is cool too! unboxing video:
cyclingplatypus said
September 12 2007 @ 9:18 am
This is one thing that I’ve wanted to buy but haven’t really committed to yet, kind of one of those Apple products I really want to like but have yet to fully appreciate what all it can do.
Hope this isn’t the last time you talk about it and the YouTube was a nice touch.
James said
September 12 2007 @ 9:48 am
Same boat as you, didn’t really blink at it initially, but now that you can do some trick stuff with it, without opening it up, it’s excellent.
I’ve got it playing just about any content I want from any mac in the house now (streaming via an afp mount)
Great device! Loads of development going on for it it seems! http://www.awkwardtv.org is the place to be
cyclingplatypus said
September 12 2007 @ 8:44 pm
Thanks for the link…good stuff, I see an aTV in my not to distant future.
ryderm said
November 13 2007 @ 7:17 am
Regarding your post:
“I found that apple file sharing wasn’t working. My Apple TV came with version 1.1 of the software, with no easy way to revert back to the ideal version 1.0. Not to worry, some more tinkering and I had this baby cranking!”
I too have a version 1.1 Apple TV and would very much appreciate some details on how to enable the apple file sharing component.
Thank you very much!
keynes said
November 14 2007 @ 5:35 pm
Hi,
My apple tv comes with version 1.1 firmware and I have encountered some problem when hacking it by patchstick.
My iMac OS is also 10.4.10. Can you describe how to hack apple tv in detail? It is appreciated that you can share your experience. Thanks a lot!
James said
November 14 2007 @ 7:42 pm
keynes, perhaps drop me an email with the exact issues you are having and I can assist…
james [at] invertedreality [dot] com
Cheers,
keynes said
November 16 2007 @ 10:08 am
Thanks.
I have manually created the patchstick and it worked!
Thanks for your kindly help.
Evan said
December 6 2007 @ 6:54 am
I have been looking for a tutorial for ATV 1.1 as all my others reads convinced me that I have to go back to os.dmg 1.0 (cannot find)
Which files did you use from 10.4.9 combo (intel I assume) to mount an AFP share ? Can you give a link to where this is documented.
Thx