I was delighted, therefore, to come across a short Engadget post entitled Myka sneaks Bittorrent into the living room. So delighted, in fact, that I’ve pre-ordered one of the units which should appear sometime in the summer. “What is it?” I hear you ask…

Well, quite clearly you can see that it’s a box that connects directly to a TV and, excitingly, it sports the official Bittorrent logo. This means that various TV shows and films can be downloaded directly to the device instead of having to download separately and then transfer over.

You see, I don’t really want companies telling me what I can or cannot do with my media. I also don’t want people telling me what I can or cannot download from the Internet. I just want a device that can play everything I throw at it, without complaints. Oh, and if I can download stuff straight to it, so much the better. Enter Myka and ‘her’ tech specs:

Key Features

• WiFi enabled – 802.11/g
• Direct ethernet connector for direct connection
• HDMI, Composite, S-Video and SPDIF ports for maximum flexibility
• Internal hard drive choice of 80, 160 or 500 gigabytes
• BitTorrent peer to peer software built in
• USB port for expansion

More geeky specs here. You can gather the sheer wonder and joy it’s likely to bring by just gazing at the plethora of ports at the back of the device:

Component and S-video in, digital out, LAN, USB, HDMI… wonderful! I’ve gone on the pre-order list for an 80GB version ($299) with no obligation to buy. It’s all done via Google Checkout, so I’ve every confidence in my (potential) purchase.

This. Could. Be. Awesome.

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!

First of all, the best places (in my experience) from which to get information about modifying your AppleTV are:

• AwkwardTV.org (especially the wiki and forum)
• SmallNetBuilder – Hacking the AppleTV
• Inverted Reality – AppleTV Hacks
• last100 – A collection of AppleTV resources
• Systm – Episode 7 (Apple TV)

I’ll continue adding links as I find them with the tag ‘appletv’ to my del.icio.us account.

The process of getting the AwkwardTV software wasn’t difficult. You simply need to create something called a ‘Patchstick’ which is a trivial procedure if you follow the Beginners Guide and are running an Intel Mac with OSX 10.4 (Tiger). If you’re on Windows or OSX 10.5 (Leopard) then you might want to search for a pre-built Patchstick image to download at somewhere like YouTorrent.

According to the instructions, you should have some problems if you’ve got an AppleTV which has v1.1 as the factory default firmware. I didn’t. All I did was follow the instructions as per v1.0 and it worked fine.

Once the AwkwardTV option appears on the AppleTV menu you’re pretty much sorted. Or at least you should be. You can enable SSH and AFP access which means the AppleTV is accessible over the network. You can also install software (plugins) that add to the device’s functionality. The best of these, and the one I was looking forward to installing, is NitoTV. This plugin enables USB and network automounting, plays DivX files etc. via mplayer and supports emulators for games on your AppleTV!

Unfortunately, when I came to the list of plugins available, NitoTV wasn’t there. Apparently this is because it doesn’t appear on the list until a couple of weeks after the most recent version has been released. Don’t ask me why – I don’t know! It was manual installation time, and I was going to have to get my hands dirty…

After staying up until 3.30am (time flies when there’s a problem to solve) I discovered what I needed to do to get NitoTV onto my AppleTV.

1. Download and extract the NitoTV plugin (usually by double-clicking on it)
2. Open the Terminal application under OSX (open Spotlight and search for it if you don’t know where it’s located)
3. Enter: ssh -1 frontrow@AppleTV.local (the password is frontrow)
4. Enter: sudo mount -o remount,rw/dev/disk0s3/
5. Enter: sudo mount -uw /dev/disk0s3
6. This means that the disk is mounted and we can write to it. You can close Terminal now, although we’ll need it again later.
7. Download and install Fugu.
8. Launch Fugu so you can transfer files to your AppleTV. You’ll need to enter appletv.local as the location to which to connect and frontrow as the user name. Tick the Force SSH1 option under Advanced Options. The password is also frontrow. Click here for an image of how it should look.
9. Once you’ve connected, you can simply drag-and-drop files from the local browser (on the left) to your AppleTV (on the right). Transfer the NitoTV folder to the frontrow user’s home directory (it should automatically take you there, but if not it’s under Users/frontrow)
10. Open up Terminal again. We’ll need to connect to the AppleTV again via SSH, so enter: ssh -1 frontrow@AppleTV.local (the password is frontrow)
11. Go into the nitoTV folder by entering: cd nitoTV (where ‘nitoTV’ is the name of the folder with your NitoTV files in it)
12. Enter: chmod 755 installme (to make sure you have permission to run the installation file)
13. Enter: sudo ./installme (to install NitoTV – the password, when prompted, is frontrow again)
14. Once the installation is finished the last step is to enter: sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/nitoTV.frappliance/Contents/Resources/fixPerm (not sure what this does but apparently it’s a required step)

Once you’ve finished, restart your AppleTV by holding down the Menu and - key together for 6 seconds. You will be prompted which language to choose and then will need to choose the ‘restart’ option. Once all this has been done, you should see something similar to the following:

The options within NitoTV are fairly straightforward and explain themselves. The only real downside to having a v1.1 AppleTV is that further steps are needed to make it ‘see’ network shares. I’ll leave that for another time as I haven’t got it figured out myself yet. At least you can transfer files to your AppleTV using Fugu!

Further to my post How NOT to upgrade your Xbox, I’m pleased to say I’ve got it working again. It’s taken a long time, a great deal of trial-and-error, and some head-scratching. To save at least one other person some hassle, here’s my ‘journey’ from a useless Xbox to one that runs Xbox Media Center, etc.

I’ll cut to the chase: you don’t want to be reading this post unless you’ve had the same problems as I had. It’s information you could have gone to bed without knowing. Trust me.

Problem: Error code 21 on an Xbox v1.0 with an Xecuter2 modchip installed.

Solution (briefly stated): Using ConfigMagic (comes with Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller) to manually enter MAC address (made-up) and unlock Xbox hard disk (using code from backed-up hddinfo.txt file). Transfer of backed-up copy of BIOS.bin to C:\ drive of Xbox via FTP. Re-flashing of EEPROM using ConfigMagic.

Moral of the story: Always have a copy of your Xbox’s EEPROM backed-up somewhere!

In the process of playing about with the BIOS, trying to get rid of the ‘flubber’ animation when the Xbox first boots, I was playing around with ConfigMagic. This program comes as part of the excellent Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller and enables you to lock/unlock your hard disk and flash your EEPROM from a file on your hard disk.

Once I’d accidentally flashed it with basically and empty EEPROM file, I was fairly stuck. I couldn’t re-unlock the hard disk nor could I FTP into the Xbox due to not having the information that had been previously part of the EEPROM. This information contains things like a long string of numbers that is unique to your hard disk, etc. Pretty much every site that came up when I searched on Google documented how to unlock the hard disk by connecting it to the PC and running the Liveinfo Linux distribution. That’s not an option for me – we’re laptop-only in our house!

In the end, because I’d backed-up everything on the Xbox before tinkering (always good practice) I was OK. I ended up editing the EEPROM on-the-fly, making up the MAC address of the Xbox along the lines of one suggested on this page. The unique Xbox HD key I got from a file called hddinfo which I found in the C:\Backup directory in the overall Xbox backup I’d previously created. I then used the ConfigMagic program to lock the hard disk. When I rebooted it showed that the Xbox had a proper IP address (instead of 0.0.0.0 which means it can’t connect).

This meant that all I needed to do was install a dashboard to allow XBMC to run. I thought this would be easy via Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller, but it didn’t work. In the end, I simply formatted the disk, connected via FTP (with Slayer’s Evox Autoinstaller running) and transferred my backup over. Once I’d finished, I followed the instructions contained in the updated T3CH release of XBMC that I decided to install. This explains and easy way to create a shortcut from the default dashboard to the directory within which XBMC is situated (in my case, F:\APPS\XBMC)

So, with the xTV skin for XBMC documented at How To: Turn Your XBox Into An AppleTV I now have a wonderful home entertainment solution again!

When I was at school my teachers used to tell me that I would go one step too far and ruin my work. Although I was never great at art and tech, they would (quite rightly) point out that the useless mess in front of me was the result of just going beyond the point at which I should have been satisfied and stopped. It would seem that impulse to tinker hasn’t left me…

Since last year we’ve had a NAS drive attached to our wireless router. The modded Xbox I bought from eBay 18 months ago is also connected via ethernet to the router:

This gives wireless access to the NAS drive from anywhere in the house and, as the NAS drive, router and Xbox are in a cupboard underneath the TV, allow us to watch DivX movies and TV programmes (via Xbox Media Center). It’s a great setup, but I had to tinker, didn’t I…

The outcome I was trying to achieve was that of this post: How To: Turn Your XBox Into An AppleTV. I was half-way there: I had the startup video and the skin sorted out. It was looking peachy. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to get rid of the ‘flubber’ animation that comes up when you boot the Xbox. You know, this one:

Trouble is, that involves modifying the BIOS. Now you’d think with a name – sorry, acronym – like that (Basic Input Output System) I’d take more care. But no. I ploughed straight in and now I just get the hardware equivalent of a nonchalent French shrug-of-the-shoulders every time I try to boot it up.

Guess what I’ll be doing with my evenings next week whilst Hannah and Ben are in Devon…