Apple TV + XBMC - nice hardware meet nice software
So first-off thanks to Ross for switching me onto this.
The AppleTV is a neat piece of hardware, small with a HDMI out for connecting to your TV. It streams movies directly in HD to your TV. One problem in Ireland is there aren't that many movies and there's no TV shows. However, the main problems are the lack of connectivity options and the poor support for media formats - both are deliberate and typical of apple walled-garden.
So on its own, the new shiny AppleTV could basically rent a limited selection of movies, which granted is a slick process. In order to connect to any other media, you need a server running iTunes - no support for UPnP/DLNA, SAMBA, Apple Networking. You can't even stick a USB hard-drive in the back.
Even if you do have a server running iTunes continuously, the support for non-apple media is poor. So essentially, for me the out-of-the-box AppleTV would be limited to on-demand movie rental.
Enter XBMC. First you need to Jailbreak your appleTV a simple process using Seas0nPass. This will install. Then install XBMC on it - which involves ssh and running a couple of commands.
Your appleTV will now connect to basically anything and will stream most media formats - allowing the excellent AppleTV hardware to be used to its full potential.
Nightlies
While more formats ran fine. I ran into some difficulties with large MKV files so I've opted to install one of the nightlies - which fixed the problem. While slighltly more complicated, it can be perfomed on top of the basic install above, which means you can choose to do this at your convenience.
The download link is here.
Reasonable instructions are here
One thing to note - as pointed out in the download link above, if you do this, you must turn off apple auto-updating checks, since these seem to interfere with this build of xbmc. This is pretty trivial, simply editing the /etc/hosts file. See this link for details.
Labels: appletv xbmc
posted by Fergal @ 12:56 PM
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