AwkwardTV

Apparently, someone made it possible to use Patchstick from Windows. Please take a look. This might be very useful for people using a real OS too Oh, they also have a Wiki.

Please note, the linked site is not, in any way, related to any of the the AwkwardTV admins. We do not control what’s on there.

Finally, Dakaix of AwkwardTV released a new version of Streamer. No huge changes, just a new icon and AppleTV 1.1 support. You can find more info about it in the Wiki, questions can be asked and answered on the Forum.

Yesterday Apple released the long-awaited AppleTV software update, including the new YouTube plugin. Along with this, the software update added a fair few things for developers to use in the BackRow framework and a new ‘AppleTV’ framework.

Sadly, they also removed just about everything from the image that wasn’t absolutely necessary for the functioning of the AppleTV software itself. So that means that there is no longer an AFP server, or AFP, NFS, etc. clients. We’ll be looking into a number of workarounds for that over the coming days, and we’ll post any useful information here.

Plugin developers were also in for a surprise when their appliance plugins stopped working on the new system. This was due to some (minor) changes in the way plugins were validated and loaded, particularly concerning the new parental controls within the latest AppleTV software. However, these were quickly worked around, and information posted on the AwkwardTV wiki detailing how to update appliance plugins for the new system.

So far ATVFiles and ATVLoader have been updated for the new system, and the BackRow Developers’ Kit has been updated to use it too, including new 1.1-compatible project templates and headers.

More information can be found here:

• The wiki page on the update
• The forum thread on the update
• Alan Quatermain’s post on the new Loader and BDK

…it’s A Series Of Tubes!

Newcomer Xdog of the AwkwardTV community made one hell of a surprise entry. He created “A Series of Tubes” (or ASOT in short), which is a frappliance (plugin) that plays YouTube movies. We already posted a preview of it, but now you can grab it yourself.

Please see the wiki entry for more info, and use the forums to ask questions or thank Xdog

EDIT: due to a small bug, version 1.0.1 got released. Grab it here.

This just in:

|bile| from the AwkwardTV community just gave us a preview of his “nitoTV” plugin. It plays movies using mplayer.

Thanks to the guys from the Moofspeak network we now have our own forums! You can visit it at http://forum.awkwardtv.org/.

With the forum we hope to reach an even larger audience with news, hacks and all other things AppleTV.
We hope you’ll enjoy your stay!

EricIII from AwkwardTV has posted FRAppliance 101, the first in a likely series of tutorials on writing Apple TV Finder.app plugins (also known as FRAppliances). The basic setup of Xcode and the development environment is described, and the creation of a simple “Hello World” plugin is explained. Will Apple eventually release developer documentation?

Should you write a useful FRAppliance, please leave a notice on the Apple TV plugins page.

ericIII from the AwkwardTV crew has created a plugin for the AppleTV that, like Sabertooth’s plugin, hooks into the main ATV GUI. However, this one plays videos, and sports a (for now, hardcoded) list of .AVI files that are not located in the Media Library.

This proof of concept demonstrates just how (relatively) easy it is to make your custom player.

Over on IRC, phoem wrote a patcher for the Watchdog kext. Now you don’t have to do the tedious hex editing anymore, this little C program does it for you.

It acts like a “sedative” for the watchdog.

source

Instructions

• Compile the watchdog on your intel mac:
  gcc -o sedative TCOWatchDog-sedative.c
• copy the resulting binary to your ATV, path
  /System/Library/Extensions/
• make a backup copy of the existing Watchdog kext
• run the patcher:
  cd /System/Library/Extensions
./sedative
• clear the kext cache:
  kextcache -e
• disable the ripstop daemon:
  mkdir /etc/mach_init.disabled
mv /etc/mach_init.d/ripstop.plist \
/etc/mach_init.disabled
• Now reboot. Once rebooted, unload Watchdog:
  kextunload com.apple.driver.AppleTCOWatchdog

That should be it! Hopefully later today, phoem will see about a fully automated binary. Ofcourse, we will bring you the news ASAP.

Thanks, phoem!

This article on TheAppleBlog.com suggests there might be a co-op between Apple and Migila, for a HDTV input device. If so, this would make a really nice add-on for the AppleTV!

Thanks to ahuxley for pointing us to the article!