IceFilms is back and ready to increase the “awesome sauce” of your Apple TV! If you are one of our many fans with XBMC installed on their Apple TVs, you are likely aware of the fact that XBMC has always offered the ability to install third party add-ons. Sadly, this past December, the official XBMC Team took the odd step of closing access to some of XBMC’s most popular add-ons.

Just when it appeared as though these amazing tools would disappear, a new home arrived to connect developers, users, and add-on development. Since moving to XBMCHUB.COM the IceFilms team has been hard at work expanding the abilities and functionalities of it’s add-on and now it is ready, once again, for the prime time.

There are a few things that must be in place prior to installing the latest build:

• Jailbroken Apple TV with XBMC installed (see existing guides for details)
• SSH File Client
  • Windows – WinSCP
  • MAC – CyberDuck
• The Current IceFilms repo
  • Use This Link http://anarchintosh-projects.googlecode.com/files/repository.googlecode.anarchintosh-projects.1.0.1.zip
• A willing mind and a CAN-DO attitude

INSTALLATION

1. SSH into your Apple TV by using the following command. Make sure you use the IP address of your Apple TV. This is located in the Network information under the Settings menu on your Home Screen.

• At the top you will likely see a drop down menu that says “File Transfer Protocol.” Here you will need to select the option that says “SFTP” or “SSH”
• Server: Here you need to enter the IP address of your Apple TV that we located earlier.
• Username: root
• Password: alpine

2. Click on the “Connect” button and you will find yourself inside the File System of your Apple TV.

3. Next you will need to navigate to the location that XBMC associates as its Home Page. This location is found @ “/User”

4. Now we need to find the repo that you download earlier in this tutorial. Once you have located the file, you will need to drag it from your computer into this file location as seen below.

5. Open XBMC on your Apple TV and navigate to the System Menu.

6. Select the option titled “Add-ons”. This will open the Add-ons control panel that is built into XBMC.

7. Click the option titled “Install From Zip File”

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So you caved in and bought the new 1080p Apple TV 3 and were horrified to discover that you cannot jailbreak it yet. Perhaps you were fortunate enough to find your older Apple TV (1st or 2nd gen) sitting in a dark damp corner of your closet underneath your old PlayStation. Regardless of which device you are fortunate enough to have, you will need one simple skill in order to take full advantage of your XBMC experience.

XBMC comes with the unique ability to install extra tools within the confines of its system. This means that once XBMC is installed you can add new add-ons/plugins to your Apple TV in order to give it some new features such as streaming live television, streaming movies from external websites, Pandora, Sports Channels, and much more.

Installing, and using, XBMC add-ons and plugins is a very simple process that can sometimes intimidate newbies, or first time users. The good news is that, by the end of this post, you will be able to install, uninstall, and find any XBMC tools you want within the confines of your Apple TV (1 or 2). Before we begin, let’s go over what we need:

• Computer
• Add-On/Plugin Source
• Apple TV (1st or 2nd-generation)

XBMC does come with many add-ons/plugins preinstalled in its database for you to install and play with. If you would like to use these specific tools simply skip ahead to STEP #9. If, on the other hand, you would like to add specialized add-ons/plugins such as IceFilms, NaviX, SuperTV, FastPassTV, 1Channel, or even Watchseries you will need to follow these instructions from beginning to end.

The first step would be to find the add-ons you want to install. You can search XBMC’s forums for things like skins, movie scrapers, music add-ons, picture add-ons, and more.  Once you find what you want… download the .zip file to your computer and remember file location you save it to.

The next step would be downloading an SSH client onto your computer. This tool will enable you to browse the Apple TV menu from your computer.

• Windows – PuTTY or WinSCP
• MAC – CyberDuck

Once you install these tools, you will need to connect the SSH client to your Apple TV:

1. Open XBMC on your Apple TV and navigate from your Home Screen to Settings > System Information. You need to locate and take note of your system’s IP address:

2. You now need to open your SSH Client. You will likely be met with either an option to open a Connection, if so select this option, or a group of boxes requiring input. Fill out the boxes using following:

• At the top you will likely see a drop down menu that says “File Transfer Protocol.” Here you will need to select the option that says “SFTP” or “SSH”
• Server: Here you need to enter the IP address of your Apple TV that we located earlier.
• Username: root
• Password: alpine

3. Click on the “Connect” button and you will find yourself inside the File System of your Apple TV.

4. Next you will need to navigate to the location that XBMC associates as its Home Page. This location is found @  “/User”

5. Now we need to find the add-on that you download earlier in this tutorial. Once you have located the file, you will need to drag it from your computer into this file location as seen below. In this case I have copied XBMC’s repo from my desktop into the file location provided.

Now that we have copied all desired items from the computer into the ATV we are now ready to put down the computer and pick up the ATV remote. The rest of these steps take place inside of your XBMC installation:

Installing  Add-ons & Plugins

1. Open XBMC on your Apple TV and navigate from your Home Screen to the System Menu. From there you should see menu options similar to what is shown below.

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Just in case you were unaware, XBMC has finally released an Eden copy of XBMC for your old Apple TV (1^st generation). Though this 1^st gen device is not the easiest to load XBMC on to, it is by no means impossible. If you simply follow these steps, from beginning to end, you will be enjoying unlimited multimedia goodness in no time.

Before we start, there are some basic requirements that are absolutely necessary for this installation process.

• Computer (Windows or MAC)
• USB port and ATV USB Creator  (grab it from the link provided and download it to your machine)
• A Flash Drive (USB Stick) that is a minimum 512MB.
• A 1^st Generation Apple TV that has been updated to the latest software, version 3.0.2!

BE SAFE: To be on the safe side, make sure that you have unplugged all other USB drives from your computer before continuing. USB Creator does erase whatever drive you are using, so you want to make sure there is nothing vital loaded on any devices plugged in once we begin.

1. Download the ATV USB Creator and save it onto your system.

2. Insert your flash drive into your computer and format it to FAT32. Be aware that this step will erase anything located on your USB stick.

3. Open and run the ATV USB Creator software that we downloaded in step #1.

4. Once the software opens up, select the following options:

- Where you see “Choose an Installation” select “ATV-Patchstick”

- You don’t need to do anything for “Download AppleTV Update DMG or Choose a DMG”. ATV USB Creator will automatically download this file from Apple’s servers, so you don’t need to do anything there.

- For “Installation Options” you should not need to change anything. “AppleTV version 3.x” should already be selected, and there should already be check marks for “ssh tools”, “bin utils”, “SoftwareMenu”, and “XBMC/Boxee for Mac”

- For “USB Target Device” select the USB drive you plugged into your computer in step #2. You may need to hit the refresh button for it to show up. Now you can click on “Create Using ->”

- When the USB drive patchstick is done being created you can then remove it from your computer.

5. Unplug your Apple TV and insert the USB drive patchstick into the back of your device.

6. With the flash drive plugged into the back of your Apple TV, plug the power cable back in. As the Apple TV begins to power up it should now be loading from the flash drive. Now we will wait for the picture of a Penguin (Tux) sitting on an Apple TV. If you do not see this picture when you boot up, and the Apple TV 1 just boots up normally, you likely need to create a new USB drive patchstick using a different USB drive (preferably using a different brand). This problem isn’t often, but it does happen.

7. After the installation is finished, the screen will say that you can reboot. When you see this screen, remove the USB drive patchstick and then unplug (& then) re-plug the power chord to your Apple TV. This will reboot your device.

8. You now have ALL KINDS OF GOODNESS installed on your Apple TV. This is most noticeable in the fact that you now have a new option on your HOME SCREEN Menu Bar named “Launcher”

9. From your Home Screen, navigate to the option labeled “Launcher”. Once there continue to “Downloads”, and then select XBMC. This may show more than one entry for XBMC, if so, select the option that says “Stable”.

10. If you are one of the lucky people who have opted to install a new Crystal HD card you should visit stmlabs.com to get more information on Crystalbuntu. It is a different software… that is installed in the exact same manner as the steps listed above.

11. Finally, from the “Launcher” section, head “XBMC” in the sub-menu to start XBMC.

12. Enjoy some amazing new features.

umOuch (Andrew Brasher)

You may also want to read:
XBMC 11.0 Eden for Apple TV 2 5.0 (iOS 5.1) released (+how to install tutorial)
How to jailbreak Apple TV 2 5.0 (iOS 5.1) with Seas0nPass (tethered)
XBMC 11.0 Eden for Apple TV – Review

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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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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@<APPLETV_IP>:/mnt/Media/<media_to_recover>/ /<Destination_local_machine>

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

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!