For those of you who have upgraded to Apples latest operating system, Leopard, keep in mind that it’s a little harder to hack an AppleTV if your still in the initial phase of using a patchstick to ‘enable’ your ATV.
Creating a patchstick will work on Leopard, however it will package files from your Leopard system which are not compatible with the ATV’s 10.4.x kernel. So the patchstick will not work!
I’ve been getting comments/emails from people asking for help on hacking their AppleTV. I’m not going to advertise ‘hack services’ on my site as I’m not sure of the legality of such activities!
Maybe we should change the term from ‘hack’ to ‘enable’. Thats just nice.
I will offer advice, consultation if you please, on how to ‘enable’ your AppleTV. This will be particularly useful for those that do not have an Intel Mac which is required to carry out ‘enabling’ of your AppleTV.
I’m happy to assist where I can, and answer questions, and ‘point you in the right direction’. You will need to email me directly with your issues or requirements. Perhaps my services would be worthy of a donation via paypal.
Thats right, I just installed and can use Skype on my AppleTV. I’ve not tested voice (audio) as yet, but it’s installed and I can text chat to my mates. It was damn easy.
First, I followed the “firefox” install from awkwardtv.org
Then applied the same concept/steps to the Skype.app! I grabbed Skype_2.6.0.151.dmg which i had on my fileserver, mounted it on my macbook pro, then copied the contents to the AppleTV:
scp Skype.app frontrow@appletv.local:/Users/frontrow (enter)
open Skype.app (enter)
hey presto, it beachballs for a sec, opens, and asks for licence agreement then login credentials! TRY IT !
sorry for strange pics. my ATV is on a widescreen CRT so there’s some flicker captured
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.
Very cool. read it all on awkwardtv.org
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!
http://www.awkwardtv.org/
Perian for the win!
What is Perian? Perian is a codec that lets you play various file/media types under quicktime, Apple’s flagship media player, editor, etc. For example, if you have encoded some of your DVD movies into DivX format, Perian will play them in quicktime.
What’s that got to do with the Apple TV? Well the Apple TV only plays mpeg-4 / H.264 media. What good is that if you have a huge collection of other-format media? Get Perian on your Apple TV asap! (see www.awkwardtv.org for information on how)
Where are we going with this? Okay, okay. The real, reason behind this post. I figured something cool out! I’ve been using Handbrake to rip some of my own purchased DVD movies to disk. I’m ripping them to H.264 (mpeg-4) and then playing them with my Apple TV, only, hang on! Some, if not all of these movies look a little “dark” on my Apple TV. When watching them, they look DARK. I checked it out on my Macbook Pro, same thing! really dark compared to the orginal DVD! Striving for quality I did some reasearch. It’s not a Handbrake issue, it’s more of a Quicktime issue. I read somewhere that the easiest fix (apart from adjusting brightness on your display) is to install the latest version of Perian component on your machine. I did it on my Macbook Pro and wow, it worked! Don’t ask me anything technical about it, I don’t really know what Perian has to do with mpeg-4 / H.264 I didn’t even know it was used to decode these formats. But it works.
I previously had Perian 0.5 on my mac, installing version 1 really helped. I erased the Perian off my Apple TV and installed the latest version that I had on my mac. bingo, looking great!
I forget where I found this information, it was in some random forum. Thanks to whoever!
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: