XBMC now installable on jailbroken AppleTV2

[NightStorm]

There's that XBMC ellistist Jerk attitude that I have grown to love

I typically find Mac users in general to be much more helpful, but that is the exact response that drove the Mac people away from XBMC in 2008 towards plex. You will never see a response like that in a Plex forum, and I guessed you would never see it on a Mac forum (I was wrong)

You must not visit the Handbrake forums then. I know I won't help someone who isn't willing to take a few seconds and help themselves. It gets pretty annoying to answer the same question over and over again because people can't be bothered to try to learn something.

 

[fkntotalkaos]

You must not visit the Handbrake forums then. I know I won't help someone who isn't willing to take a few seconds and help themselves. It gets pretty annoying to answer the same question over and over again because people can't be bothered to try to learn something.

I'm sure you would fit right in

 

[NightStorm]

I'm sure you would fit right in

Ouch, that hurts.

Anyways, to bring this back around to the topic at hand, I'm planning on picking up another ATV2 this week and giving XBMC a shot... the installation and configuration doesn't seem all that difficult for someone who isn't afraid of the command line.

 

[BlackMangoTree]

There's that XBMC ellistist Jerk attitude that I have grown to love

I typically find Mac users in general to be much more helpful, but that is the exact response that drove the Mac people away from XBMC in 2008 towards plex. You will never see a response like that in a Plex forum, and I guessed you would never see it on a Mac forum (I was wrong)

Plex is rubbish at scrapping/scanning foreign films. I have over 200 Italian movies and it does a lousy job, even English spoken movies aren't anywhere as good as using the IMDB addon in XBMC.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Plex is rubbish at scrapping/scanning foreign films. I have over 200 Italian movies and it does a lousy job, even English spoken movies aren't anywhere as good as using the IMDB addon in XBMC.

Plex uses an IMDB scraper. I'm not sure about the foreign film thing but for any movie or TV show I've put into Plex 0.9.x it's scraped with no problem.

Perhaps for the foreign films there's an international IMDB?

 

[aussiedj]

Seriously.... Who cares about getting the actors & their photographs & names of the directors etc etc. When I tried to play a simple 700mb avi on XBMC it told me that it couldn't find the film, told me to enter the name of it. So I did & it couldn't find it. And if it can't find it, it won't let you watch it!!!

SERIOUSLY... I don't care about this rubbish. All I want to do is browse through my files, like I do on my mac & click play. I know what the movie is, and I know who's in it because I DOWNLOADED IT.

Let's take a vote:

a) simple program that just works seamlessly & perfectly.

b) complex program that mostly doesn't work, is extremely complicated to get going & is riddled with problems.

VOTE NOW.

 

[thadoggfather]

I want to buy Apple tv 2 now. This sounds perfect for Netflix and all my shows without doing mini display out anymore.

Questions:

1)if i buy an apple tv, can i JB it now with the latest fw it ships with?

2) Also, can i do it with a mac?

I'm used to the JB scene on iPhone. Had every iPhone. jailbroken all. unlocked. i got it figured out.

Thanks guys

 

[seanchristopher]

You can jailbreak the latest fw with Seas0nPass, but it's a tethered jailbreak. It looks like an un-tethered version is coming soon though. And yes, you can do it on a mac.

 

[BlackMangoTree]

Plex uses an IMDB scraper. I'm not sure about the foreign film thing but for any movie or TV show I've put into Plex 0.9.x it's scraped with no problem.

Perhaps for the foreign films there's an international IMDB?

The Free database it uses its useless and the unofficial IMDB agent is poor as misses so much info. Always pulls the English title as if i want o go through and change every single movie. It simply doesn't work as well as XBMC for scraping/scanning movies.

 

[BlackMangoTree]

OK so XBMC had a fight.

Clearly the OSX version of XBMC is A LONG WAY from being finished & actually working for the majority of users, unless you are a dev yourself.

So it would now seem that XBMC having just lost their OSX team, knowing they were going to fork, decided to dump this half finished mess on us, sit back & wait for the community to take over, fix their problems & turn around & capitalize on being the first one to do it at their former colleague's expense.

Am I seriously reading this right?

XBMC a long way off from being finished ? It works percetly on OSX

 

[mstruve]

Seriously.... Who cares about getting the actors & their photographs & names of the directors etc etc. When I tried to play a simple 700mb avi on XBMC it told me that it couldn't find the film, told me to enter the name of it. So I did & it couldn't find it. And if it can't find it, it won't let you watch it!!!

SERIOUSLY... I don't care about this rubbish. All I want to do is browse through my files, like I do on my mac & click play. I know what the movie is, and I know who's in it because I DOWNLOADED IT.

Let's take a vote:

a) simple program that just works seamlessly & perfectly.

b) complex program that mostly doesn't work, is extremely complicated to get going & is riddled with problems.

VOTE NOW.

I admit it took me a full day to get this working yesterday, but now that it is, I love it. It is working seamlessly for me, and I like having all the covert art, info etc. That's kind of one of the main points of XBMC.

If all you want is lists of files then I don't think this is the software for you, it's overly complicated for what you're after.

 

[denm316]

Not that Hard

I picked up a new Apple TV2 on Saturday. Overall not that hard of a process to get XBMC installed.

I used SeasonPass from FireCore to do the Jailbreak (which is tethered). After that I connected via SSH and ran I think three commands and everything was downloaded and done. Pointed XBMC to my NAS and it picked everything up immediately without issue.

The only problem I had was it would not output DTS-HD and AC3. I quick search and I just had to edit an XML file in the XBMC directory. I am not the greatest with terminal commands so I was able to just just Cyberduck and copy the XML file off, change two settings from False to True and copy it back on. Worked perfectly.

The navigation in XBMC is a little slow, totally bearable. This is the only reason I bought AppleTV as XBMC has a beautiful interface and plays everything. I usually watch 720 MKV BluRay rips. So its great to not have to convert anything, both for Audio and Video.

 

[spencers]

No luck... I've changed the 'regional' for UK however the time remains for UK or UK (24) and infact... no matter what i change it too the time stays the same!

Try this

cd /private/var/db/timezone
rm localtime
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT localtime
killall AppleTV

Thread: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91521

 

[DaveNinja]

I installed XBMC on my ATV2 and its working great. the one problem i'm having is that i cant figure out how to get a contextual menu up with the ATV2 remote. I added video source twice and want to delete one of them but cant figure out how.

 

[iKennett]

Try this

cd /private/var/db/timezone
rm localtime
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT localtime
killall AppleTV

Thread: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91521

I spent ages looking for this and found that thread earlier today. Thanks It works!!

I'm *really* liking this!

 

[Tkotm]

I installed XBMC on my ATV2 and its working great. the one problem i'm having is that i cant figure out how to get a contextual menu up with the ATV2 remote. I added video source twice and want to delete one of them but cant figure out how.

Menu for 2/3 second and the contextual menu will appear.

 

[MecPro]

Shame!

I bought a Popcorn hour a couple of weeks ago, this would have been perfect! But people say the 1080p streaming of MKVs aren't that good, so I have to kiss this goodbye until the chip is powerful enough (next 3 years again!)

 

[spencers]

I installed XBMC on my ATV2 and its working great. the one problem i'm having is that i cant figure out how to get a contextual menu up with the ATV2 remote. I added video source twice and want to delete one of them but cant figure out how.

Here's what I'd recommend:
Get an XBMC remote app from iTunes for your iPhone/iPod Touch.
I prefer this one. If you have android, app-based remotes exist, as well.

Or what he said:

Menu for 2/3 second and the contextual menu will appear.

 

[DaveNinja]

thanks! i was trying to hold buttons down but couldnt figure out which one.

with the simple ATV2 remote is there a way to fast scroll up/down besides going to the right to the scroll bar? like how the ATV2 in menus will speed up if you hold up or down for a while?

 

[Norrsund]

Here's what I'd recommend:
Get an XBMC remote app from iTunes for your iPhone/iPod Touch.
I prefer this one. If you have android, app-based remotes exist, as well.

Or what he said:

I downloaded this XBMC remote app earlier today and I can't get it working. Have you used it with the Apple TV 2?

 

[VoR]

I downloaded this XBMC remote app earlier today and I can't get it working. Have you used it with the Apple TV 2?

I don't have an ATV, but have you checked the network settings and made sure 'Web Server' is enabled?

 

[spencers]

I downloaded this XBMC remote app earlier today and I can't get it working. Have you used it with the Apple TV 2?

1 Goto XBMC Network Settings
2 Enable http webserver and set it to use port 8080
3 Choose login/password. People typically use xbmc/xbmc

Then set up your remote app. Sometimes it won't automatically show up in discovered devices, and you'd just have to do it manually. Be sure to know the ip address of the ATV2

 

[Norrsund]

1 Goto XBMC Network Settings
2 Enable http webserver and set it to use port 8080
3 Choose login/password. People typically use xbmc/xbmc

Then set up your remote app. Sometimes it won't automatically show up in discovered devices, and you'd just have to do it manually. Be sure to know the ip address of the ATV2

Thanks for the tip, but it looks like the webserver is disabled in the current Apple TV 2 build.

From XBMC for iOS current issues at a glance

webserver disabled (so xbmc remote apps for smartphones / ipod touch, or anything else dependant on the web server will not currently work)

Also, support for third party remotes (ie Logitech Harmony) is not working

no support for third party remotes. Will be coming in future releases

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Working and bug free are two different issues (Works on iPhone4, though it’s currently frustrating to use. taken from their website in their words). From what I remember, XBMC was so full of bugs on Leopard, I would not call that "working" as it was quite unstable .... Go figure the Elan and the OSX team decided to work on future support not past operating systems, 10.4 and 10.5....

Go figure? Plex decided they didn't want to bother to support existing users and so they decided to play the "go buy a new machine" game. That's their business, of course, but it means that it will not run on 5 out of my 7 machines here (2 Apple TV Gen1, 1 PowerPC G4 Mac acting as a media server, 1 2008 era Macbook Pro, 1 Hackintosh Netbook and a PC running XP plus an ATV2 still in the box unopened). For example, Plex doesn't work on Tiger and therefore Plex doesn't work on the first generation Apple TV and never will. Plex doesn't work on PowerPC and never will. Plex "sort of" works on Apple TV2 if you call "working" requiring a very fast host computer to transcode video for a device that is fully capable of doing itself. If I have to buy a fast computer to transcode (i.e. I cannot use that computer for other tasks while it's wasting CPU time to transcode), I might as well just buy a MacMini or home theater PC and be done with it. It's almost pointless in that sense.

XBMC works with PowerPC in both Tiger and Leopard. XBMC works with Apple TV 1 & 2 natively (no transcoding). XBMC also works on other platforms (x86, etc.). In short, XBMC works on 7 out of 7 machines here.

My only complaints about XBMC have been the lack of chapter support for M4V (added in 10.0) and the inability to read M4V meta tags (supposedly coming in a future release since it seems that their tag reader for MP4 music files can read the tags on M4V as well).

Boxee would be more useful on Apple TV 2 since a lot of the content does not play well on Apple TV 1.

Having to use a Mac to reboot an Apple TV 2 is not very appealing, though. I was planning on replacing one of my Apple TV generation 1 units with a 2 (and moving the old one to a bedroom or something) since the Netflix app is nice and now that XBMC is here, it seems idea. But I think I'll wait until the frame drop/bugs/kinks are worked out. Not having to convert non-M4V to M4V is the most appealing aspect of XBMC. It's a shame Apple refuses to support other standards like AVI and MKV in iTunes. If they did, it would all be unnecessary, IMO.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

a) simple program that just works seamlessly & perfectly.

b) complex program that mostly doesn't work, is extremely complicated to get going & is riddled with problems.

VOTE NOW.

I think XMBC just isn't your thing dude. If you want to just open a file and watch on your Mac then I'm not really sure why you even want an Apple TV. For those of us who have dealt with Front Row weak features and Apple TV's lack of formats and are really ready to take the necessary steps to get what we want, then you install XMBC/Plex.

Although I would suggest skipping the AppleTV and getting a small HTPC or LinuxHTPC.