It’s been a few days since this hack came out, but there is a chance you’ve missed it focused on your Thanksgiving and Black Friday activities: a jailbreak app called AirVideoEnabler can push out video from any iOS app (including Safari) to the Apple TV 2G via AirPlay. Developed by TUAW commenter Zone-MR, the app runs on every jailbroken iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad with iOS 4.2 (or greater) installed and can be downloaded from Cydia for free. According to Lifehacker, you may need to restart your iOS device for the hack to work, but then you can stream supported video (meaning most MPEG4/H.264 files) from any app that supports video out. Users report that thanks to AirVideoEnabler they were also able to stream live TV to the Apple TV via AirPlay.
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And here it comes: Apple TV 4.2.1 software update is now available! It brings a support for AirPlay, a new feature that lets you stream movies, music or photos (and who knows what else!) from any iOS device running iOS 4.2 (also released today), Macs or PCs running iTunes 10 to your TV via the Apple TV. The new update also comes with VoiceOver support for spoken menus and meta data. NetFlix on atv is now Voice Over accessible too. Here is a video showing how the VoiceOver works on the new Apple TV.
Groovy, an unofficial Grooveshark client for the Apple TV 2G, has finally arrived. Grooveshark is an online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music free of charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. Groovy aims to bring the Grooveshark to your living room via the new Apple TV. The developers admit that the current feature list is not long (simple search and player functionality) but they say they are working hard on the next version with much more functionality (e.g. Grooveshark login, better search result, better player view). They also promised to release the source code in the near future. Go to the Groovy website for the instructions on how to install this new plugin on your freshly jailbroken atv.
UPDATE: Plex client for Apple TV 2 has been updated to version 0.10. Read here how to get and install it.
This is just awesome: iOS hacker quiqueck made it to install Plex on the jailbroken Apple TV 2. Based on the open-source XBMC, Plex now works as a client for your ATV and lets you stream nearly any kind of video from your server (read your Mac). Plex for ATV2 is just a “proof of concept” so it is still buggy, tricky to install and limited to video playback (no music files, no images, no App-Management) but anyway, this is looking really good for the future of Apple TV2 applications (after the Weather app, this is the second iOS app that works on the new Apple TV).
Here are the detailed instructions given by quiqueck and a step-by-step video tutorial brought to you by iphoneblogr.com
We don’t want to enter “Jailbreak Wars”, so we will stick to the facts: geohot, a developer who released limera1n jailbreak for iOS 4.1 devices, has just updated his page to announce that “AppleTV is technically supported, but theres no apps yet.” TUAW’s Erica Sadun confirmed that when she put her atv2 into DFU mode she was able to jailbreak it. “But since no AFC services or OpenSSH were installed (let alone APT), there’s nothing that really can be done with it at this time,” she said. Chronic Dev team, that was supposed to release its greenpois0n jailbreak on Sunday, said they will have to delay the release in order to have time to integrate the exploit used in limera1n into greenpois0n to “save SHAtter for future devices that may still be vulnerable to it.”
Update: according to this AwkwardTV page, “limera1n doesn’t work because of ramdisk issues, it never mounts or installs anything, ostensibly not making any changes at all to the AppleTV filesystem.”
“We’ve sold a lot of them but it’s never been huge hit,” Jobs said last week. How could we not agree: Apple TV wasn’t a game changer for the living room. But hey, there are hundreds thousands of users completely satisfied with the existing ATV (according to the analysts, Apple might have sold 3 million Apple TV devices worldwide) and most of them never even thought of hacking this mysterious box! That’s why here at Apple TV Hacks, we think Steve has figured it out very well: what the average customer wants from his/her HDTV in the living room is to play latest movies, popular TV shows, family vacation photo slideshow and maybe some music from time to time. We, geeks, need more, that’s obvious, and that’s why we are so disappointed with the new device. The only thing we can do now is to try to squeeze as much as we can out of this hockey puck when we put our hands on it sometime at the end of September.
But before that happens, let’s focus on what we know about the second generation Apple TV so far.
