Great news for anyone looking for a tiny, cheap standalone XBMC box: You can now install XBMC on an Apple TV 2. Here’s how it works.
First, the great news here: The Apple TV is an inexpensive $129— about $100 less than the Acer nettop I installed XBMC to. I haven’t tested it yet, but Engadget’s video demo (above) makes it look very promising. Installing XBMC on your Apple TV is a pretty simple process:
Step One: Jailbreak Your Apple TV 2
If you’ve got a Mac on hand, this is a pretty simple process using Seas0nPass.
Step Two: Log Into Your Apple TV as root and Install
From a Terminal prompt, you need to SSH into your Apple TV; you can simply enter:
ssh root@apple-tv.local
…and use alpine as your password. (That’s the default password; if you’ve changed it, use whatever you changed it to.) Use your Apple TV’s local IP address for the SSH connection if apple-tv.local doesn’t work.
Then simply paste the following code into Terminal, one command at a time:
echo “deb http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2 ./” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.list
apt-get update
apt-get install org.xbmc.xbmc-atv2
Step Three: Enjoy XBMC!
That’s really all there is to it. The hardest part is jailbreaking the Apple TV, and even that’s a piece of cake.
As I said, I haven’t had time to fully test it yet, but the folks at Engadget seemed pleased with the test unit they tried out. And now I’m actually happy I got that Apple TV for Christmas.
Paul
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:14 PMApple Tv suddendly got attractive.
Anonomoose
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:15 PMAnd how would I do this using windows…?
roboprez
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 9:22 PMWell you need a mac to jailbreak it in the first place. If you got over that step somehow there are many programs that let you ssh. Just google windows ssh
bzerkr
Friday, June 24, 2011 at 11:23 PMThis information is incorrect. You can jailbreak from PC as well as Mac.
Tim
Friday, January 21, 2011 at 8:30 PMCan we have a review on how it handles different video formats, please?
Christopher Kezelos
Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 8:08 AMYeah I’d like to know how it handles MKV files? I assume it doesn’t do it out of the box, does XBMC change this?
Christopher Kezelos
Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 8:11 AMCancel that thought, I watched the video which answered my question :)
Cal
Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 5:26 PMI set mine up with the server running on my i5 Hackintosh. I’ve got a crap load of multi-channel audio MKVs and it streams them very well. The only thing that isn’t polished yet is the audio. It send 2 channel PCM only with the voice on the right and effects on the left. I’m sure I will be sorted soon but at this point it’s a great start to something awesome.
Dani Haywood
Monday, January 24, 2011 at 11:55 PMAnyone in OZ got the Jailbreak to work?
Danny Hummel
Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 3:31 AMThere are two important things to note before getting started:
1) As of right now, this is considered a “tethered” jailbreak, meaning that you have to physically connect the Apple TV 2 to your Apple computer in order to boot it correctly (aka “tethered boot”).
2) Also, the computer that runs the Seas0nPass.app file (the file that actually jailbreaks your Apple TV) will need to have Mac OS 10.6 or later.
I had to stop going through the steps because I have OS 10.5.8.
Hmph.
Ryan
Monday, February 14, 2011 at 3:18 AMFor Windows, RC6 of greenpois0n released yesterday with Apple TV support.
It is now possible to buy an stock Apple TV, untethered jailbreak it, and install XBMC without a mac, and also without doing any ssh crap – the GP software does it all.
Did it this morning, and everything works great.
Dean
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 1:17 AMHi Ryan,
I’ve been trying this for 4 hours now. I have made it through to greenpois0n telling me it’s jailbroken about 5 times, but whenever I turn it back on, nothing’s changed in the menus. Any ideas?
Ed
Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 3:59 PMI have the same problem! how did you fix that? help pls!
tokolatte
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 6:15 PMAlso, one can term in by using http://www.cryptoterm.com via Win machines
pagan
Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 9:04 PMat the apt-get update stage there appears to be a package missing – others seem to report the same thing. I tried re-jailbreaking but makes not difference… Any clues?
Ign http://mirrors.xbmc.org ./ Packages
Hit http://apt.saurik.com tangelo-3.7/main Packages
Ign http://mirrors.xmbc.org ./ Packages
Err http://mirrors.xbmc.org ./ Packages
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Hit http://apt.awkwardtv.org stable/main Packages/DiffIndex
Err http://mirrors.xmbc.org ./ Packages
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Hit http://apt.awkwardtv.org ./ Packages/DiffIndex
Fetched 1328B in 6s (208B/s)
W: Failed to fetch http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/at… HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
W: Failed to fetch http://mirrors.xmbc.org/apt/at… HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
Apple-TV:~
kelley
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 12:23 PMmine never prompts for password its jailbroke with season pass HELP
Adrian Combe
Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 4:59 PMThis seriously failed and also apparently permanently disabled any chance of anything else ever working.
Is
echo “deb http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2 ./” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.list
supposed to be one command line? I have never used this particular shell language.
Now, no matter what I put in, I get this error:
E: Type ‘.deb’ is not known on line 1 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.list
Please help…
randomaccess
Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 9:36 AMAdrian, are you copying and pasting the line directly in?
because i did, and the “‘s were replaced with .’s
make sure the lines you enter are the exact same as the ones posted
and if you want, run: cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.list and make sure that deb http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2 ./ is in there