More AppleTV hacking. Last night I figured I’d see if my keyboard and mouse work on the AppleTV after tinkering with all the new nitoTV enhancements. Indeed they work. I can quit out of the gui and see the system preferences where I can get the keyboard and mouse to work. Only, you cant see the mouse pointer! very tricky.
I followed the instructions on the awkwardtv wiki to enable the mouse pointer, and install firefox.
Worked a TREAT! It’s actually quite good. I’m really impressed. Now when I’m having an argument about a movie with my wife I can stop the movie, jump into firefox and do some quick IMDB research to prove a point
I’ve also installed the ‘netusage’ extension for firefox so i can see my internet quota usage, and I’ve bookmarked my local weather sites.
Man is nitoTV the bomb or what? I installed it as soon as I had my appleTV hacked. which I’ve written about before, but get this, the latest version has some very important and cool things built in.
Firstly, you can install additional software/hacks from within nitoTV now. Things like smb/afp network mounting (i already did this manually). The best of all. the turbo kext USB hack! I was going to get around to doing this hack manually, one day. But nitoTV just makes it so simple already! I carried out the hack, rebooted the ATV, and plugged in an external hard disk drive. booyah!
I setup a symbolic link in my ~/movies/ folder to point to the mounted hard disk (called laser) like this:
sudo ln -s /Volumes/LASER/ ~/movies
so now when using nito or atvfiles and I’m browsing like I would browse a network share, the external hard disk appears in my files list. I think this will be the way to go. Streaming movies across my wireless “G” network was fine, but not when the microwave was running! stupid 2.4Ghz…. not cool when cooking dinner!
Do yourself a favour, build a patch stick, then install the latest nitoTV, the rest is really simple!
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:
I don’t know about you, but my desk in my home office is non-stop trashed with cd’s and dvd’s, everywhere… Not having anything to organise them into could be half my problem. hah!
I noticed at work a cd-carousel storage thingo. It’s a Project Lab “Century CD”. A little round box that holds 100 disc’s and connects to your computer with USB. Install some software and you can catalogue your media, insert it into the carousel, and eject the media as you desire.
It doesnt actually read your media as such. Just store’s it for you, and gives you the ability to catalogue things. You stick the disc in your computer first, the software asks if you want to catalogue it. Say yes, name the disc in the software, and then shove it in the carousel. It prompts you the title of the disc (that u set earlier) you choose from a list, and press ok. Now the carousel knows that “disc x” is in “slot x”. It’s all searchable, etc too.
