In February PolyVector and I got an Apple TV. I promised a small article on modding it once we had everything all setup. So, here it is! I am going to do a small little walk through on the resources I used and how I managed to get everything up and running. I do want to note the methods used here are after a second round of trying to figure out an easier way to modd the Apple TV after the 2.0.x updates were released. Our first attempt at modding was extremely difficult and made getting any Apple TV updates not impossible, but very time consuming. By the way, this little run down is going to have you hacking your Apple TV without removing the internal hard drive, or taking it apart in any way.

Preparation

Well, the first thing you need is an Apple TV. The new Take 2 versions are completely acceptable. We originally modded a 2.0 and this modding method was a direct result to get the new 2.0.2 software up and running.

A USB thumbdrive that is at least 125MB. I used a 256MB Cigar Pro 2.

An Intel Mac OS X Tiger system restore disc. One that comes with a new Mac, I used my aluminum iMac’s install disc. The disc definitely needs to be newer than the first gen MacBook restore discs, as when I was going through this it did not work properly.

The last thing you need is pretty much a tutorial link. I am not going to walk you through the tutorial myself as I think the one I followed was pretty darn easy and specific enough except for the few notes I gave you above for preparation. All the downloads you need will also be linked to in the following tutorial.

Go straight to iClarified - AppleTV Install SSH with a Take 2 Patchstick. Be sure to follow the tutorial exactly and you will have a perfectly working USB drive that will auto patch your Apple TV so you can SSH (or SFTP) to install plugins.

After the Initial Hacking

So you have SSH (SFTP) enabled on your Apple TV, what can you possibly do with this thing. Actually a lot! You can now access the Apple TV’s file system so this means you can add video and audio codecs. The Apple TV is using a special version of Front Row which means that it uses Quick Time. Playing DivX, XviD and other formats is as easy as installing Perian. To make it even easier, you can follow another iClarified tutorial which walks you through all the Terminal voodoo.

The downside to all this is you still won’t be able to stream DivX etc, files from your desktop. This means you need a way to access the file system on your Apple TV via the GUI you see on your TV screen. This is where ATV Files comes in. It allows you to set folders and an easy way to get to them on your Apple TV for playback. Once again iClarified has a tutorial on installing ATV Files, but the link to the ATV Files download is to an older version that is very difficult to setup. Instead of downloading the version stated in the tutorial you should get the newest version from the ATV Files wiki. Because you are going to be using a different version than the install tutorial, you might need to modify the Terminal commands you use to match the file name of the newer ATV Files version.

Resources

This is the last little bit I am going to go over quickly. Some huge resources you should bookmark regarding hacking/modding your Apple TV are as follow:

AppleTV Hacks - For news on plugin updates, community forums for help, and general Apple TV info.
iClarified Apple TV Tutorial section - Some of the easiest and most up-to-date tutorials for modding your Apple TV.
AwkwardTV - A place to find ATVFiles and a bunch of other plugins to make your Apple TV do more than you probabl ever thought it could.

Done

I hope you enjoyed my tiny walk through. Thanks for reading!

Yesterday we got the awesome surprise of having our Time Capsule delivered early. I was able to take photos of the unboxing due to an unexpected (but fun) trip to PolyVector’s parents’ for dinner. We stayed up late getting the Time Capsule all setup and working. I was so excited that my photos are not the best they could have been. but they give you a pretty good overview of the Time Capsule and how we fit it into our network.

I am not going to give this product a review just yet. I feel that networking equipment especially need at least a good month of real use before telling how the product is really going to handle. Since Polyvector and I heavily rely on our home network I think we’ll be able to give it a good test. We constantly stream and backup over both wifi and ethernet.

Initial setup was quite easy, but very different than what we are normally use to. Apple has taken a webless interface approach to the Airport Extreme and of course this applies to the Time Capsule. As a Mac user, you simply go to your Utilities folder in Applications and run Airport Utility. This will scour the network for any Airport Extremes, Airport Express, or Time Capsules you might have and displays them in a nice little application.

This is the first router we have ever purchased from Apple and we actually had a few doubts about how well we could customize our network. We were pleasantly surprised at the options the Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme) offered. We were able to setup our closed wifi network using 5GHz 802.11n and there are even options for static DHCP, which is extremely useful on our network since we stream lots of media and run various local servers that require connection by IP rather than a network name (such as iMac.local). The only thing the Time Capsule/Airport Extremem cannot do is Access Restrictions for domains. We used to block the Google Adsense and Analytics servers using our routers so we would never click on our own ads by accident or be logged as a statistic on our own sites. However this isn’t a must have feature for a router as you can get various tools to do it at the browser level (most people do it this way anyways)

As for Time Machine setup. I don’t think there could have been an easier process. I mean this was created for Apple’s new backup system built into Leopard. And I gotta say it does the job wonderfully..

All you need to do to get this baby going is open up the Time Machine preferences in non other than System Preferences, turn it on and choose the “Data” folder on the Time Capsule. I am not going to go through the whole setup process right now as it really is extremely simple. I will say on your first backup to the Time Capsule there is a Finder transfer window that opens up and will remain for the entire time the backup goes. This is a one time window and all other backups after will not have this. I just thought I would say it now before anyone gets mad at their new backup system.

I think that’s it for now folks. I will field any questions you might have in the comments. And indeed we are backing up two Macs onto one Time Capsule and each gets their own special folder, so no backups will conflict with another.

Hope those who read this enjoyed it.