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 Intro The Apple TV (aTV) has been in existence since 2007. The original aTV had an internal hard disk for storing media; however, was never widely adopted, but had a very active developer community that allowed users to customize their devices. With the release of the second generation (aTV2), Apple shifted to a streaming device and the aTV became a small footprint device with minimal storage. The community strengthened as the aTV2 went on to sell millions of devices. One primary limitation of the aTV2 was the hardware-limited 720p output. In 2012, Apple announced a revamped aTV3 that featured full 1080p as well as an improved A5 processor. Features Out of the box, the aTV can provide you with access to a number of internet services and your own content. Internet Services:
Streaming Video: You can stream video content from your iTunes-equipped computer to your aTV. This content MUST be either H.264 or MPEG-4. There are a number of software solutions that can allow you to convert your content to the appropriate format including:
AirPlay: AirPlay allows you to send a stream (video or audio) from one Apple device to another. Your aTV functions similarly to an Airport Express station and can be selected in iTunes as a "speaker" option. You can also push video from your Apple Devices (including iPads and iPhones) to the aTV. Additionally, you can send audio from your aTV to AirPlay-enabled speakers, AirPort Express, or other aTVs. OS X Mountain Lion and above have built-in support for AirPlay, but there are some alternate software solutions to push video content from your computer to your aTV.
Remote Control Apple bundles a very minimal remote control to control your aTV, but they also provide a way that you can train your aTV to accept input from literally any remote control out there. Additionally, there are a number of applications so that you can use your iDevice as a remote control (really great for filling in text fields on your aTV).
Jailbreaking Jailbreaking is the process of altering your aTV to allow you to install any software that you wish. The jailbreak community has made it very simple to jailbreak your aTV and you can easily restore it through iTunes. It is important to note that if you are having problems with it and have to take it into the Apple Store, it is best to restore your aTV first. Note: You will need a micro-USB cable to connect your aTV to your computer. Common reasons to JB your Apple TV:
Status of Jailbreak With every new software or hardware release, the ability to the jailbreak the device changes. To determine the status of the jailbreak on your ATV, check out the Jailbreak Matrix Current status: aTV2 - 5.0.2 has an untethered jailbreak. Currently, there is NO jailbreak for the aTV3. This is due to the use of a newly-designed A5 processor from Apple. Someone will have to find a new exploit for this to occur. Hopefully, the aTV will generate enough interest to encourage the JB community. Jailbreak-specific questions should be directed to the iOS JB thread Types of Jailbreaks
Media Center Options Note: All of these modifications require you to jailbreak your aTV XBMC Media Center XBMC is an extremely popular media center on a variety of platforms, thus it is no surprise that it has also made it's way to the ATV. XBMC Eden (v11.0) was released on March 24th, 2012 complete with a port to iOS. This has many improvements over previous versions including a more responsive interface as well as better support for all media types. Advantages:
Official XBMC Thread Installation tutorial iOS-specific XBMC Questions Plex Similarly to XBMC, Plex allows you to play a much wider range of content than that afforded by the stock software. Plex utilizes a server-client configuration. In this setup, your ATV2 acts as a client that streams content from another machine configured as a Plex Media Server. In addition to local content, you can access a variety of online content via Plex apps. Advantages:
Plex Installation tutorial Other useful jailbreak apps aTV Flash (black) ($30) - This is an application available from FireCore that provides you with a web browser (capable of playing Flash content), a plex client, as well as the ability to stream content from an NAS. Supports AVI, MP4, MKV, and DVD files NitoTV - Some people may not be comfortable dealing with using SSH to access their ATV. NitoTV provides an interfaces for installing new software via the main ATV menu. Frequently Asked Questions I have a ton of avi files on my computer. Can I play those? If you have a large movie collection and want a set-top box that is able to find and playback whatever you throw at it, you'll want to consider jailbreaking and installing either XBMC or Plex (see above) I just bought the aTV3, what do I do now? You can use all the stock apps, but there is currently no jailbreak solution for the aTV3 so you cannot install any of the alternate media players. Checkout the video converters listed above so you can at least stream your media from your computer Can I access all of the stock apps after jailbreaking? Yes. The standard menu is still available, although may have some extra options for installing extra software. Can I play all of my 1080p content if I jailbreak? Kinda. Using the Media Center software mentioned above, you can play 1080p content, but it will be scaled down to 720p since that is the maximum output resolution of the aTV2. Theoretically you can play 1080p content at 1080p when the aTV3 is jailbroken. Can I install both XBMC and Plex? Absolutely. These applications run like any other app on the ATV so just launch the one that you care to use. I've heard that XBMC is sluggish, is that true? The User Interface is typically slightly less responsive than the desktop release. The developers have been working on this and it is improving What is the difference between a tethered and un-tethered jailbreak? A tethered jailbreak means that the device must be plugged into your computer in order to boot. An untethered jailbreak remains jailbroken after rebooting. What is this NAS thing you mentioned? It is a network-attached storage solution. The aTV can talk to this directly without need for an additional computer. Go checkout the NAS Thread Modern Pragmatist fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jan 9, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2012 21:45
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Mister Fister posted:Been fairly happy with my ATV2 and XBMC. I've never had a problem showing subtitles. I believe they need to be separate .srt files that are stored alongside the media files. Additionally, you need to make sure that subtitles are enabled. You can do this by holding down the middle button on the remote for 3 seconds while the movie is playing and it will bring up the OSD menu. You can then go to the audio section and enable the subtitles.
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Apr 26, 2012 03:44
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CygnusTM posted:Anyone know of a Magic Media Marker alternative for Windows? This looks promising because it relies heavily on HandBrake, although I've never tried it. Basically any batch encoder for HandBrake would work out ok. http://videoscripts.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/handbrake-batch-gui/
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Apr 29, 2012 15:41
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Bucket Joneses posted:Is it a reasonable expectation that I should be able to send content to the ATV from my iPad while XBMC is running and not crash XBMC in the process? Or is AirPlay something that is only going to work from the main iOS dashboard? XBMC now has an AirPlay server built-in, but it appears that if you try to use the ATV one then it will crash XBMC. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=AirPlay#Apple_TV_2
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Apr 30, 2012 20:00
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mattdev posted:Will the Apple TV play mkv files with subtitles and multiple tracks? File support is probably my biggest concern. Be advised that if you had 720p or higher content, you want it to be x264 encoded to ensure smooth playback on the Apple TV.
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May 8, 2012 14:05
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AppleTV 5.0.1 update just dropped. - HD Previews for movies and TV shows - Airplay, Home Sharing, and Netflix bug fixes http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4448
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May 11, 2012 18:23
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LastInLine posted:I'm having a Home Sharing problem with my AppleTV 3. I bought those $5 DRM-free comedy specials from Louis CK, Jim Gaffigan, and Aziz Ansari with the intention to put them into iTunes and play them on the ATV via Home Sharing. All are 1280x720p, all are h.264, but Ansari's comes as a .mov and the others as .mp4. Did you try converting the .mov file to a h.264 .mp4 using Handbrake? I'm not sure why this should make a difference, especially since they are already all encoded as h.264 but it would be worth a try. Usually stuttering like that is due to the ATV having to use software encoding, but I would have thought that you'd prevent that by using the stock software. As far as network speed goes, I kind of doubt that is it for the same reasons you pointed out. The Apple TV is the slowest link in the setup since it only has a 10/100 ethernet port (god knows why) but that should be able to stream 720p content with no problems.
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May 21, 2012 14:26
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Currently, Overflow is non-functional with the latest untethered JB. http://blog.firecore.com/8099
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Jun 3, 2012 17:13
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Cannon Goose posted:1. Do all my video files have to be in the iTunes folder? Currently they are all in their own folder on my external drive and iTunes is installed on the internal drive. I don't have nearly enough space on my internal drive to keep all the video files on there, so I was wondering if you can point iTunes at another folder or something?  Cannon Goose posted:2. How does the ATV3 handle 5.1 audio? Right now I can stream it to my PS3 if I encode MP4s with Handbrake's AAC 6 channel discrete option and that works beautifully. Will the ATV be able to stream the audio? Apple TV doesn't handle 6-channel audio. It must be encoded as 5.1 in order to get surround sound.
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Jun 15, 2012 15:15
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Cannon Goose posted:I was under the impression that the 6 channel option in Handbrake basically was 5.1 (6 channels with one of them being the .1) but if that isn't the case then how would I go about ripping proper 5.1 sound? https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/SurroundSoundGuide quote:Another method is to create 5.1 channel AAC audio tracks. For the Track Mix, select "6 channel discrete" from the drop-down menu, and your movie will contain discrete surround sound in the modern AAC format.... It cannot be sent over an optical cable to a home theater amp. If you try, whether on a Mac or an AppleTV, you will only hear "downmixed" surround sound, similar to Dolby Pro Logic. The ideal settings for Handbrake to work with the aTV are Dolby Pro Logic II with AC3 pass-through.
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Jun 15, 2012 17:26
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MickRaider posted:Do we know how much space the OS consumes? I assume it's under 1 gig. On my jailbroken ATV2 I get the following: code:
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Jun 28, 2012 02:28
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The pHo posted:Hopefully dead easy question: my dad has an ATV2 which I put XBMC on and every so often I copy some stuff across to it. Other than that, he pretty much only uses it for Netflix... how much data can I copy across to the ATV without impairing it's ability to cache? Or is that on a separate partition, and it doesn't matter if I max out the one that I can write to over SFTP? The Apple TV's caches are located in /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches The breakdown of the disk space on the ATV is: code:
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Jul 9, 2012 17:56
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Laserface posted:What is the best place/twitter to follow to keep up with if/when the ATV3 gets jailbroken? Believe me, you'll know. There may even be an audible cheer heard round the world. I agree with the iOS 6 statement. Definitely opens up some additional avenues.
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Jul 24, 2012 23:12
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Bucket Joneses posted:Does anyone have a link to accurate instructions for getting a router running dd-wrt to work with a service like StrongVPN? Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places or just not following instructions correctly but I can't get it to work for bypassing MLB.tv blackouts. Like this?
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Jul 25, 2012 19:19
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Thwomp posted:Hell loving yes: http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/31/hulu-plus-app-live-on-apple-tv/ Just came to post about Hulu+ being added. That's pretty big news. I am curious to see if the app is still automatically added on jailbroken devices.
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Jul 31, 2012 14:17
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Legdiian posted:Current builds of XBMC for ATV support AirPlay. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=AirPlay#advancedsettings.xml Based on the wiki, mirroring is not yet supported. You can however, have it function for audio and video.
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Jul 31, 2012 21:32
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HolySwissCheese posted:Are people still selling their Apple TV second generations for a big profit? The best offer I've gotten for mine on Craigslist in Austin is 120. That's big enough for a new 3rd Gen plus tax plus a burrito, so it's not a terrible deal. Just wondering if I should hold out for more. Ebay may be the better route. My buddy put his up with $160 Buy It Now and it was sold in a few hours.
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Sep 11, 2012 13:53
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puppy party posted:The ratings/comments seem to be swaying back and forth pretty hard. Can anyone vouch for it? I see that it's goonmade but that doesn't mean a lot to me. If I'm going to drop money on an app I'd at least like to see some better opinions of it. I've used it myself many times and had no problems. Looking at the comments though, people do seem to have a number of issues with it. That's really one of the unfortunate things about the App Store is that you don't get trial periods with the software to see if it works for your specific needs. I know it doesn't help with the metadata, but you can always use Handbrake for converting the video (which is what MMM uses behind the scenes)
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Sep 16, 2012 15:29
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dexter6 posted:I have been slowly converting my AVI and MKV collection to m4v using Handbrake, but obviously each run takes a while. I recently tried using MP4Tools and have not had much luck. The videos seem to convert fine, and the M4V files play fine in VLC, MPlayerX and Quicktime however they do not play in iTunes and will not transfer to an iPad. Not related to MP4Tools, but you could whip up a very simple bash script to convert all of your AVI files to M4V using HandBrakeCLI. code:
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Sep 17, 2012 01:53
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New 5.1 ATV software update for those of you using non-jailbroken ATVs. Details here Shared Photo Streams - Accept invitations for Shared Photo Streams, browse photos and comments, and receive notifications of new content. AirPlay - Send audio content from Apple TV to AirPlay-enabled speakers and devices (including AirPort Express and other Apple TVs). Also includes the ability to require an onscreen code to use AirPlay with your Apple TV. iTunes account switching - Save multiple iTunes accounts and switch quickly between them. Trailers - Search movie trailers. In the United States, see show times for local theaters. Screen savers - New Cascade, Shrinking Tiles, and Sliding Panels screen savers. Main menu - Reorder icons on the second page by holding down the select button on the remote. Subtitles - SDH support for the deaf and hard-of-hearing as well as improvements to viewing and selecting subtitles. Network configuration - Support for setting up advanced network options using configuration profiles. See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5437 for more information. Stability and performance - Includes general performance and stability improvements.
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Sep 24, 2012 18:55
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EDIT: Double Post.
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Sep 24, 2012 19:01
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Just in case you don't have enough Apple in your life, they've added an Events channel to the Apple TV so you can watch a live stream of the event going on this morning. http://www.tuaw.com/2012/10/23/apple-adds-apple-events-channel-to-the-apple-tv/
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Oct 23, 2012 13:11
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Bojanglesworth posted:It would also be pretty rad if you could download apps, like a Spotify app for example. That would all be software updates that wouldn't require any hardware refreshes. I do wish they'd put a gigabit ethernet port on there but that's really the only thing I can think of.
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Nov 7, 2012 15:25
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puppy party posted:I bought Magic Media Marker so that I could have files automatically remuxed once they hit a certain folder, but I can't get the drat thing to remux anything. It will convert like Handbrake, which takes forever, but not remux. At one point remuxing was working fine for me but it seems to be broken with the latest release. I sent an email to the developer to see if this is a bug that was introduced.
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Nov 12, 2012 14:36
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:Ok before I try it out, Hulu on the ATV is the paid version of Hulu right? Same with Netflix? Correct, Hulu is only for Hulu plus subscribers. Netflix doesn't have a free option. The free trial will just give you a Netflix account for 3 months or something.
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Dec 3, 2012 15:17
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averox posted:Anyone wanna throw down me some repositories for my freshly jailbroken ATV2? There doesn't seem to be a good single site for all this crap. There really is no central repository full of apps for the apple TV or anything like that. Check the OP for a list of popular things to do with your apple TV and follow the links to tutorials etc.
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Dec 7, 2012 00:11
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Feenix posted:So I have an ATV2. I jailbroke it about a year ago, messed around with putting a Weather widget on it, put XBMC on it, which ran like stuttery dog-poo. I'm not sure when you installed it, but last year XBMC released Eden (11.0) which I found to be a huge improvement in terms of smoothness and also more reliable decoding. They should be coming out with a stable release of Frodo (12.0) soon which I can only imagine will be a little better. Whether you should sell it or keep it really depends on what you use it for. If you can get by without needing to access media on an NAS or something then it may be worth it to you to sell it. After all, you can turn a ~$100 profit by upgrading to an ATV3. However, if you need more functionality than the stock system provides, I would give XBMC another shot or maybe try Plex.
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Jan 25, 2013 19:19
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Feenix posted:Admittedly, I haven't used eBay much in my life, when I posted my AppleTV yesterday, it suggested I would attract more buyers by making my starting bid 99 dollars. (So I did.) It'll pick up once all the other items that started at 99 cents catch up.
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Jan 27, 2013 03:14
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HBO Go airplay support is a step in the right direction for sure. We can dream of the day a real app comes along. http://allthingsd.com/20130212/ok-well-let-you-stream-hbo-go-to-your-tv/
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Feb 12, 2013 22:19
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wyoak posted:It has problems though - if I use my iPad, I can't background the HBO Go app, otherwise the stream stops, and on my iPhone I couldn't even lock the screen without it stopping. Funny you should say that... Seas0nPass is out for 5.2 (ATV 2 only, of course) http://blog.firecore.com/post/43012930684/atv-flash-black-2-2
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Feb 14, 2013 00:32
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Based on the Terms of Service, you can have Netflix activated on up to 6 different devices and watch simultaneously from two.
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Feb 19, 2013 23:06
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AppleTV 5.2.1 is out with a bunch of bug fixes and a re-designed Hulu Plus. @evad3rs (The Evasi0n jailbreak group) is credited with all of the security holes. Obviously, if you're jailbroken you'll want to hang out until further news on Seas0npass
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Mar 19, 2013 21:08
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Acrolos posted:I'm running the power cords in the wall as well, so it's a completely clean system with no cords showing. As a side-note, you may risk voiding your home owners insurance by running power cables through the wall. Just something to consider.
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Aug 3, 2013 15:54
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