One of the main reasons behind the choice of the AppleTV was the fact that it supported 5.1 digital surround sound through the HDMI cable output. This made it a snap to connect the device to my Sony STR-DG820 receiver which was connected to my LCD television and 5.1 speaker setup. Another compelling reason for this choice was the simplicity with which I would be able to connect my iTunes library containing rips of all of my cd and dvd collection to my home entertainment system.

However, from the first I read with great interest the various accounts of successful hacks that had been applied to the AppleTV to expand it use beyond those set forth by Apple.  I was most interested in the ability to install a browser (Firefox, Safar, WebKit, etc.) and the chance to use Boxee and/or XBMC.

Initially I was drawn to the opensource atvusb-creator project, if for no other reason than the fact that it was free.  Of course, the geeky aspects to such a project were no small source of fun, as well.  However, I ended up using the ATVFlash product in the end since it tied all the various pieces and parts so nicely into a polished interface.  The ATVFlash project incorporated many of the opensource projects that allow AppleTV users to have access to external harddrives, keyboards, mice, non-Apple content providers, not to mention the ability to run Boxee, XBMC, Firefox and a host of other programs.

Along with other intrepid users I rapidly began finding ways to enhance the software with iPhone based remotes for the non-Apple programs.  Using a VNC server I was able to connect my iPhone to the AppleTV to control the mouse and keyboard inputs when browsing.  Later, ATVFlash provided the same level of access with the Mobile Air Mouse client/server architecture.  I could even install iStatPro on the device to monitor the bandwidth and process usage.

As I delved deeper into the process of using other online providers of content, such as Hulu, I began to realize that the hardware upon which the AppleTV was based limited the amount of usability that one could gain outside of the sandbox that Apple had seen fit to build.  The Boxee project was excellent at giving me access to a multitude of content choices, Hulu, TED, CW, Pandora, last.fm, and many others.  ATVFlash gave me the ability to play content types that were foreign to the AppleTV, such as avi, wmv, and mkv, not to mention the ease of installing Firefox and Flash so that I could watch NBC, FOX and ESPN360.com.

The one thing that these software projects could not do was to give the AppleTV the power to crisply deliver fullscreen Flash content to my LCD or to allow me to play Netflix movies.  There is only just so much that one can accomplish solely through software upgrades, after all.

As I contemplated these shortcomings, I realized that I needed to upgrade my hardware yet again.  The choice then became what platform do I use.  Did I move back to a Linux platform, move to Windows with MediaCenter edition (or even Windows 7), or stick with my beloved Mac platform?

As I stated in my first entry on this subject, my friend Justin was successfully using a hackintosh with the Plex project as an upgrade to his own AppleTV.  After watching the results, I settled on Plex as my software delivery system, yet I could not for various reasons bring myself to go the route of the hackintosh.  As I was unlikely to ever go back to being a complete Windows user again, and since all of the games that I wanted to play were either available for the Mac OS or could easily be played in a VMWare container, I saw nothing to compel me towards anything other than genuine Apple hardware, except possibly price.

With this in mind, I purchased a 2009 2.26GHz Mac Mini at the Apple Store at Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta this past December, where not a year past I had picked up my AppleTV.

My next post in this series will detail some of the software setup that I am currently using as well as some tips for getting the most out of your own Mac Mini home theater setup.

Over the years I had slowly upgraded one piece at a time so that I had gone from a simple cable box to a home-built MythTV setup to a Tivo HD.  Yet after all of these upgrades, I still felt that it was silly to be paying so much money to my local cable provider for so many stations that I never watched.

It was, then, with no small amount of interest that I watched the procession of the Family and Consumer Choice Act of 2007, which was supposed to allow families to choose and pay only for the stations that they wanted.  While this grew out of the fervor over the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show where Janet Jackson’s experienced a “wardrobe malfunction”, I was still happy to see that I might finally get a la carte cable.  Unfortunately, this bill never made it out of committee, and as of 2008 had not yet made it to the floor for a vote.

It seems that with all of this that my best option for both saving money overall and controlling what my money went too, was to drop the big cable provider and start using DVD rentals, NetFlix and the internet to obtain the programming I wanted to see.

My first step was to procure an easy-to-use method of playing video on the TV screen.  While I already had a relatively decent DVD player, I had begun to transfer a large portion of my DVD collection to a hard drive connected to my Mac laptop so that I could switch movies more easily.  Thus, in November of 2008 I purchased an AppleTV at the Apple Store in Lenox Square Mall while on holiday to visit my friends in Atlanta.

After setting up the AppleTV and connecting it to my iTunes library, I embarked on a long journey towards completely digitizing my music and movie collection.  This combined with the ability to buy or rent movies and television shows from Apple, went a long way towards my goal of being able to get the majority of the content I wanted without a monthly fee to Mediacom Cable.

Still there was a large chunk missing: live television broadcasts of both dramatic content and live events.  My next post in this series will detail the steps I took to alleviate those holes using the AppleTV as a basis for some ingenious hacking.

I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple TV using iTunes.  I use the built-in Apple TV profile to do this.  The profile sets the frame rate option on the encoder to be “Same As Source”.  It turns out that if your rip has a final fps (frames per second) that is greater than 30 then the resulting movie will not be available in the list of Shared Movies on the Apple TV.

After installing Firefox and getting USB keyboard and mouse support going, I realized that it would be tremendously cool if I could control it from my iPhone instead of using a wired keyboard.

To begin with I installed OSXvnc.  The only problem was that I needed to store a password.  After reading a the VNC post on the aTV Flash forum, I successfully conquered that.  However, I had the same problem that iMattUK had: you had to use an ssh connection to start it.

To conquer this I wrote a launchd plist to launch OSXvnc for me at system startup.  Read on for the process I used to get it all working.

Install OSXvnc

1. Download Vine Server (OSXvnc).
2. SFTP/FTP/SCP Vine Server.app to the Documents directory in /Users/frontrow/ on the Apple TV.
3. SSH to the Apple TV and run the following commands:
   1. cd Documents
   2. cd Vine\ Server.app
   3. ./storepasswd YOURPASSWORD /Users/frontrow/vncpasswd
   4. cp Contents/Resources/OSXvnc-server /Users/frontrow/Applications

Setup Autostart

This next part is a little complicated if you haven’t done it before.  On OS X 10.4 Apple did away with the traditional Unix methods of starting daemons at system start.  The new method they implemented is called launchd.

What you need to do is to create a launchd plist to start the VNC server.  Since vi is not included on the Apple TV you will need to create this file on your computer and upload it.

Here’s the meaty content of my launchd plist:

<key>Label</key>
<string>com.arfore.VNC</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true />
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/frontrow/Applications/OSXvnc-server</string>
<string>-protocol</string>
<string>3.3</string>
<string>-rendezvous</string>
<string>Y</string>
<string>-rfbauth</string>
<string>/Users/frontrow/vncpasswd</string>
</array>

Here’s the entire plist:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.arfore.VNC</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true />
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/frontrow/Applications/OSXvnc-server</string>
<string>-protocol</string>
<string>3.3</string>
<string>-rendezvous</string>
<string>Y</string>
<string>-rfbauth</string>
<string>/Users/frontrow/vncpasswd</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>

Download the plist here.

Here’s how to put it in place:

1. Take the text above and save it in a file called com.OSXvnc.plist
2. SFTP/FTP/SCP the file to the Documents directory in /Users/frontrow/ on the Apple TV
3. SSH into the Apple TV and run the following commands:
   1. sudo cp /Users/frontrow/Documents/com.OSXvnc.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
   2. sudo reboot

At this point your Apple TV will be rebooted.  After it comes back up use the VNC viewer of your choice to connect to AppleTV.local on port 5900.  You should see the screen.

This is not really useful to control the FrontRow interface, but it works great to control Firefox or EyeTV.

Thanks to iMattUK for the tip on storing the password for OSXvnc-server.

Update (2008-12-17): The problem that was plaguing Bill has to do with the difference between the filesystem view when using FTP vs. SFTP.  When logging in via FTP you don’t actually get access to the whole filesystem.  In order to access the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ directory you have to use SFTP.