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My ongoing saga with the refurbished AppleTV I bought continues. After hacking v1.1 of the firmware that came as standard on the unit, I then upgraded it to v2.0 as soon as it came out. Currently I can transfer files via SSH directly to the device (instructions on how to do that here) and play pretty much anything, as I’ve installed the Perian plugin for Quicktime.

What I want is something like XBMC which I’ve got installed on my old Xbox. With that I can play almost any type of media directly from my NAS drive (an unmodified Buffalo Linkstation). I’ve tried following the instructions in the Take 2 Full Update Procedure on the AwkwardTV wiki, but to no avail; I still get errors when I try to access network shares from my AppleTV.

For the moment, I’ve found a workaround. It’s an AppleScript that basically fools the AppleTV into thinking it’s a standard .mov file that it can play out-of-the-box. I followed the instructions here, but all you really need to do is:

1. Download and unzip AppleTV Fooler (backup copy here).
2. Drop a video file onto the AppleTV Fooler AppleScript.
3. Drag-and-drop the new version of your video file into ‘Movies’ in iTunes.
4. Sync with your AppleTV.

That should do it. Any problems, just comment!

Posted: March 8th, 2008
Categories: Technology
Tags: AppleScript, AppleTV, AwkwardTV, DivX, hack, iTunes, movies, Perian, SSH, video, Xvid