Hackszine.com: AppleTV Archives

Archive: AppleTV

July 28, 2007

AppleTV external USB media storage

A working patch was released today that will allow you to use an external USB device as the primary storage for your audio and video media.

Just a recap for those who are not familiar with this. A few months back, AppleTVHacks.net and FatWallet set up a bounty looking for a way to use an external USB drive as a primary storage for the Apple TV. The patch must still allow the Apple TV to boot from its internal hard drive but only use the external USB drive as its primary storage.
First of all, our team would like to thank Patrick Walton of University of Chicago for sending us the original entry. We certainly appreciate his effort; it was a quite an achievement. Unfortunately, syncing did not work. By the time we realized the problem, Patrick was already too busy to fix his code.

Fortunately, Tom Anthony, our resident geek, was able to pick up where Patrick left off and fixed the syncing problem that the original patch had.

This is known to work with version 1.0 for sure, but some folks are claiming it doesn't work with 1.1. So, for now, there's still room for some additional hacking on this one.

Get busy filling up your device with your terabyte-size video collection. Just make sure to back up your system before applying this patch.

References:
USB Patch Download and Instructions - Link
HOW TO - Back Up and Restore the AppleTV Hard Disk - Link
Enable SSH Access to Your AppleTV - Link

May 22, 2007

Watch YouTube videos on AppleTV (very soon)

A Series of Tubes is an AppleTV plugin that allows you to browse and view YouTube videos on your AppleTV. It's currently in private beta and supposed to be released any day now. With a recent Digg mention, the dev team will hopefully be psyched enough to wrap up the beta stage and get rev 1 out the door.

A Series of Tubes wiki - Link.

April 10, 2007

AppleTV Perl plugin

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Phil @ Make writes: Erica has a special treat for Perl folks with Apple TVs!

On Sunday, with a hundred better things to do but no incentive to do them, I put together an Apple TV plug-in that allows you to run any Perl script you place into a folder in your home directory. (/Users/frontrow/perlbin).

The idea is this: a lot of people know how to write Perl who don't want to learn to program Cocoa. And you can add new scripts from your normal office work computer (via ssh) but have them all available from Apple TV. You can do date & time, calendars, stock quotes, weather, and so forth. Scrape web pages, subscribe to RSS feeds, whatever.

The plug-in is here - Link (zip).

Related:

HOW TO - Run AppleTV on a Mac mini - Link.
AppleTV OS on a Mac mini - Link.
AppleTV hack weekend - Link.

April 8, 2007

AppleTV RSS plugin

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AppleTV is becoming quite the hack box, check out this RSS plug in! Link.

Run Asterisk on an Apple TV

Apple TV hacker l0rdr0ck put together a procedure for getting Asterisk running, turning the Apple TV into a telephony appliance!

To get Asterisk running on Apple TV requires (obviously) and Apple TV. It also requires an Intel Mac, as there are no development tools available on the Apple TV (yet). We've divided the process into three steps: preparing your Apple TV, building Asterisk on your Mac, and finally installing the compiled Asterisk code onto the Apple TV.

Install Asterisk on Apple TV -Link.

Related:

April 3, 2007

Apple TV: State of the Hacks

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Phil @ Make writes: Erica Sadun has been hacking away on the new Apple TV and presents this "State of the Hacks" roundup of what people are doing with their Apple TV boxes. Discover what kinds of mods are out there and whether they're the right fit for your needs and abilities.

MacDevCenter.com -- Apple TV: State of the Hacks - Link.

Related:
AppleTV hacking weekend @ Hackzine - Link.

April 1, 2007

Run Standard OS X on the AppleTV

Check out this video of plain vanilla OS X running on the AppleTV.

semthex from Hackint0sh.org, in collaboration with AppleTVHacks.net has done it again! A complete replacement to the Mac OS X kernel has been built which allows the full version of Mac OS X to be run on an Apple TV.
Semthex wrote a processor emulation for the kernel, to sidestep the hardware restrictions that previously disallowed Mac OS X from running on the Apple TV.

This is now a $300 micro-mini, and an obvious opportunity for a more customizable media center.

Resources:

Enable SSH Access to Your AppleTV

After you've backed up your AppleTV disk, the next obvious step is to enable SSH so that you can connect to the AppleTV remotely. This will let you connect to the machine and make updates without needing to remove the hard disk anymore.

Tutorial Ninjas put together a nice howto for doing just this. It walks you through disabling the firewall, enabling the ssh daemon, and disabling the Watchdog app after rebooting so that you can run other applications -Link.

Once you have SSH working, you can replace your hard drive and boot the AppleTV. The userame and password for ssh access are both frontrow, and that user has sudo access (also with password frontrow). Keep in mind the security implications here.

If you want to lock down ssh and set things up to use RSA authentication, you'll need to install ssh2. awkwardTV has a wiki that explains how to swap out your ssh1 installation. Just be sure that you can connect to the new ssh daemon before logging out or you'll have to connect the hard disk to another machine again -Link.

March 31, 2007

HOW TO - Back Up and Restore the AppleTV Hard Disk

Before you start playing with the software on the AppleTV, it's prodent to make a bit-level copy of the internal disk. That way, if something goes wrong during your experimentation, you can restore the disk to its original state.

To do this, you'll be removing the AppleTV's disk, putting it in another machine (Linux or OS X), and copying the contents to a file on another hard drive. Note that you'll need a minimum of about 40gig on the other drive to store the disk image. You'll also need a 2.5inch external drive enclosure, or a 2.5inch to 3.5inch IDE adapter for attaching the drive to your other machine. Finally, there's a good chance that opening the case will void your warrantee... but it's for a good cause right?

Back up:

First, remove the hard disk from your AppleTV. Check out Makezine's instructions to dissect your new toy -Link.
Connect the drive to your computer as if you were adding a second disk. On Linux, it will be available as /dev/hdb or /dev/hdc depending on whether you slaved it to the first drive or put it on the second channel (we'll assume hdc). In OS X, use the diskutil list command to list the partition tables on your drives. The AppleTV disk will have HFS partitions named Media and OSBoot. We'll assume /dev/disk2 for this article.
Copy the disk's entire contents to your hard drive. In Linux, run:

dd if=/dev/hdc of=/home/[username]/appletvdump.img bs=1024k

For OS X users, it's the same thing, just a different device:

dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/Users/[username]/appletvdump.img bs=1024k

This should take a while, and you'll see/hear both hard drives being accessed. When it's finished, you should have a 40gig (approximately) file on your other computer. On a new AppleTV disk, a lot of this is unused, zeroed out space, so you can gzip it to save some space on your backup machine.

How To Restore:
To restore, we just go through the same process as above, but instead of writing the disk's contents to a file, we write the backup file's contents back to the disk:

In Linux:
dd if=/home/[username]/appletvdump.img of=/dev/hdc bs=1024k
In OS X:
dd if=/Users/[username]/appletvdump.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1024k

That's all there is to it. With your backup in place, you're now free to monkey around and try some of the other tricks we're posting on this AppleTV weekend (or concoct a hack or two of your own)!

HOW TO - Boot AppleTV From USB

The above video describes how to put the AppleTV into recovery mode, where it will boot from an attached USB drive. It's a matter of attaching a usb drive, holding down the menu and minus buttons to enable recovery mode and rebooting.

The ultimate goal is to be able to get to a point where people can hack their AppleTVs without needing to open the case. To do this, work is being done to prepare a suitable recovery image for the USB drive that will enable SSH on the internal disk -Link.

AppleTV Running On a PC

bikedude880 from the hackint0sh forums posted this video of the AppleTV OS booting on PC hardware. It looks like this is a proof of concept - it's possible that this isn't fully functional yet. Anyone know more about this? Link.

Previously:

HOW TO - Run AppleTV on a Mac Mini

March 30, 2007

Call For Hacks: It's an AppleTV Weekend!

The Internet tubes have been chock full of AppleTV hacks this last week. This weekend, I'll be collecting links and posting everything on the subject I can find, hopefully recapping at least a portion of all the cool things that are happening with this new platform.

If you've got a good AppleTV hack that hasn't been posted yet, please send it in and I'll make sure it gets included.