Apple TV Hacks » SSH

iOS apps running on Apple TV

tomek — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:33:59 +0000

Little by little the apps are coming to the Apple TV. Hacker and iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith and a hacker called TheMudKip have made it to run iPhone and iPad apps on an Apple TV 2, jailbroken with Seas0nPass. Using @TheMudkip’s MobileX window manager for iOS, and @chpwn’s MobileLaunchpad launcher to go with it, they managed to get multiple iOS apps running natively on Apple TV, without AirPlay. Later on, they even figured out a way to run iPad applications at a full 720p resolution.

Using a custom springboard, the software that powers the app launcher, also allowed for another new feature: side-by-side apps. This lets you see on the big screen all the applications running at a time, e.g. different chat applications.

“Nick had written this amazing window manager for the iPad that replaced the entire homescreen, allowing you to run multiple apps side by side, and I realized this could enable iOS apps on the Apple TV for the first time. We’ve spent the past 2 days modifying everything to work really well on the Apple TV screen size, etc, and getting apps to run,” Troughten-Smith told CNET.

Since the Apple TV doesn’t have a touch screen, the hackers are using a combination of VNC, SSH and the Apple Remote to launch and navigate apps. However, Troughton-Smith said he is working to make it Apple remote-only.

The hack isn’t publically available yet. For any enterprising hackers who want to make a UIKit Apple TV app, Troughton-Smith published an input library needed to get started (to add Apple TV IR input to an iOS app).

You may also want to read:
Apple TV 3 or Apple TV set?
FireCore releases aTV Flash (black) 1.0 to supercharge the Apple TV 2
How to install aTV Flash (black) 1.0 on Apple TV 2

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Installing and Configuring a FTP Server in Your Apple TV 1st Generation

Ruben — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:39:32 +0000

Today we will install an FTP server in one of our Apple TV 1. FTP means File Transfer Protocol, and a FTP server is a program sitting in your device, waiting for someone to send him files (or ready to send them). Then, if you have an FTP server in your Apple TV, you can transfer files easily an quickly from your Mac OS (in a Finder window, Go menu and select connect to server, then ftp://locationofappletv) or your Windows machine (just enter ftp://locationofappletv in your Explorer window).

For this tutorial to work, you need to have SSH access to your Apple TV. Of course, this is the first step in any jailbreaking tutorial, so I’ll assume you are past this step. If you are not, you can find more details in our How-To category.

This will only work (in an useful way) in an Apple TV1, since the Apple TV2 lacks a hard drive and FTP needs somewhere to store the files. What else do you need? Well, you need the FTP daemon. A daemon is a special kind of program in UNIX systems that watches what is happening… Oddly enough, the name comes from electromagnetism’s theory father, James Maxwell. Odd happenings.

Where can you get this little program? The easiest source is an Intel Mac. You can copy this file straight if you are in a Mac computer: it is located in /usr/libexec/ftpd You have to copy it to /usr/bin/ftpd You also need to make it executable, do it by logging to your Apple TV and then

sudo -s
chmod +x /usr/bin/ftpd

What happens if you don’t have a Mac installation at hand? Well, I found a trick in AwkwardTV‘s wiki to install the FTP server. You just grab it from the recovery partition in your Apple TV. This is a special part of your Apple TV’s harddrive where Apple puts a copy of the operating system. Then, if everything fails, you can safely start your system from there.

The procedure for getting this is as follows: You ssh into your Apple TV and then issue the following commands:

sudo -s
INSTALL_SOURCE='/tmp'
DAEMON='usr/libexec/ftpd'
dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=$INSTALL_SOURCE/recovery.dmg bs=1m
hdiutil mount $INSTALL_SOURCE/recovery.dmg
hdiutil mount /Volumes/Recovery/OS.dmg
cp -p /Volumes/OSBoot\ 1/$DAEMON /usr/bin/
chown root:wheel /$DAEMON
hdiutil unmount /Volumes/OSBoot\ 1
hdiutil unmount /Volumes/Recovery -force
chown root:wheel /usr/libexec/ftpd

This is just the UNIX way of mounting the recovery disc, copying the file, making the file usable and unmounting the disk. It won’t fire any missiles anywhere.

Things are closer to an end. Now we have the FTP daemon sitting in your Apple TV… But it isn’t active yet. Moreover, we want to be able to connect to it, so we need some user that can talk with him. Enter into your Apple TV via SSH and issue the following:

If you know what you are doing, you can do use some command line text editor. What does this blurb do? It writes a PList file (a property list in Apple’s OSes) telling iOS to run the FTP daemon. To write it, we use the UNIX command cat, which is one of the simplest ways to write a file. Once we have this file, we can load the daemon with:

launchctl load $PLIST_FILE

Now the only thing left to do is create a user to access via FTP We will name this user appletvftp. Run the following via SSH:

USERS_FILE='/etc/ftpusers'
cat >> $USERS_FILE <<EOT
appletvftp    allow
EOT

Yay! The only thing left to do is to check that you can transfer files to your Apple TV. Follow the steps we said at the beginning about Mac’s Finder or Windows’ Explorer. By the way, if you are in a Linux system, you have several ways to access, probably your file manager has some “connect to server” option quite visible. Try it.

I hope this has helped all those Apple TV 1 users out there! Stay tuned for more tutorials, and don’t forget to subscribe to our brand new newsletter.

Picture courtesy of Omoon at Flickr

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How to Recover Data from Apple TV

tomek — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:14:58 +0000

You are trying to boost your pc performance in some less conventional way and then, suddenly, there is only gray smoke what have left from your 1 TB heard drive and your enormous movie collection? Your ‘puppy’ buried your brand new tiny netbook in the garden and you will never find out where? Lost your music and last holidays’ photos? You’re crashed but you recall you had copied it to your Apple TV some time before. Yes, coping files to the Apple TV is making a backup without knowing it. The only question now is how to get it back. Here is what you have to do to recover your priceless media files from your atv.

1. Enable SSH on your Apple TV

here is how to do it: Enable SSH & AFP on your Apple TV

2. Execute the following command:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@:/mnt/Media// /

example:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@192.168.27.150:/mnt/Media/Photos/ /tmp/

In this case all the photos stored in Apple TV will be copied to the local directory /tmp/

That’s all. Yes, it’s that simple.

In case you want to recover all the data without specifying any subdirectory use the following command:

$> scp -1 -r frontrow@192.168.27.150:/mnt/Media/ /myAppleTVfullbackup/

NOTE:

It will work on Mac, Linux as well as on Windows with openSSH
To enable SSH you have to have your Apple TV already hacked
The structure of directories and file names on Apple TV is the same like the one used in iPods

Enjoy and good luck!

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How to run BitTorrent on Apple TV

tomek — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:38:03 +0000

Another great work from Danny! He has published a tutorial explaining how to install transmission (bittorent client) on the Applet TV and run Clutch web-interface to control bittorrent from browsers.

To get through this new tutorial you first need to enable SSH on your Apple TV (check out Danny’s previous tutorial). The new hack is generally based on installing transmission, MAMP web server and Clutch.

It’s then possible to control the Clutch even via the iPhone.

Users had reported some errors but the problem seems to be solved now, after Danny made some corrections. Go to the comments to learn more.

Check it out!

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Do you want to feel like a wizard? Check the Kymera wand in Amazon: You can control your Apple TV waving a wand!