The folks behind Boxee, the open source social media center software (based on XMBC), recently announced support for Hulu, CBS and Comedy Central. If you're the owner of an Apple TV, you're now just a 1GB memory stick away from watching a lot of free high-def streaming content on your little video appliance. Boxee developer Dave Matthews takes you step by step through the install in the above video.

You'll need a Boxee account first, and you'll want to make sure you format the flash drive as a bootable Mac OS X Standard partition (not FAT). After that it's about as simple as running the ATV USB Creator application to put the appropriate files on the Flash drive. Then just boot the AppleTV with the drive inserted, wait for the install to complete and, finally, remove the drive and reboot. There's some mention on the ATV USB Creator page about needing to do a factory restore if the patchstick is used more than once, so be careful to run it only once.

Boxee.tv
ATV USB Creator
Boxee on Apple TV forum discussion (read this)

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

A Series of Tubes wiki - Link.

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.

Related:

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

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.

Related:

• HOW TO - Back Up and Restore the AppleTV Hard Disk
• Enable SSH Access to Your AppleTV
• Apple TV: State of the Hacks

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.

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:

• Get the modified kernel
• Configure an OS X install for the AppleTV

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.

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)!

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.

Previously:

• HOW TO - Run AppleTV on a Mac Mini