How To Install XBMC On Your Apple TV 2

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 [email protected]

…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.

[Install XBMC on ATV2]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


18 responses to “How To Install XBMC On Your Apple TV 2”

Leave a Reply