Apple TV 2 and Airplay
It has been a while since my
last post about Apple tv. I have bought the new Apple TV 2 a few
weeks ago, and I’m really excited about one thing, one thing I
couldn’t easly do with my old (hacked) Apple tv. The thing that
exited me is, of course Airplay. A feature that Apple could have
easily been added to the Apple TV 1, since the encoding happens on
the other device, but than again the 99 dollar isn’t that big
amount for a product with really big potential. The limitations of
Airplay in IOS 4.2 is a bit of a bummer, but Steve Jobs has
promised us improvements:
MacRumors
Reader: Hi, I recently updated both my iPhone 4 and
iPad to 4.2. I think my favourite feature is airplay. This is
seriously amazing and makes sharing content seamless. I just
purchased Apple TV and was wondering are you ever going to make
airplay video work for videos in safari and 3rd party apps? I hope
to get a response.
Steve
Jobs: Yep, hope to add these
features to Airplay in 2011.
Let’s
just hope the broadcasters will not pull the same trick they pulled
on Google TV (blocking content to IOS ). For now we have
jailbreaking our iPhones and iPad. The Cydia tool AirVideoEnabler
by Martin Rosnski is just what we need. Thanks to some “spelunking”
work by TUAW’s Erica Sadun, it was discovered that a single line of
code is all that’s necessary to spread the feature to any app that
relies on Apple’s MediaPlayer framework, including VLC, AirVideo,
and even Safari. For now I don’t see a reason for jailbreaking my
Apple tv it self. As Erica Sadun shows, there is a big potential in
iPhone and iPad apps using Airplay.
Hacking Apple TV Take 3 Tutorial
Here is a little tutorial on how to Hack your Apple tv, to run Boxee, XBMC and enable a external-hard-drive.
This tutorial is an alternative to atvflash and is completely free!
After you hacked you apple TV with this you can play the following video formats:
- AVI, DivX, Xvid, FLV, WMV, RM and RMVB
- MKV formats supported up to 480p resolution (hardware limited)
- MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-3 and MPEG-4
- DVD files (VIDEO_TS/VOB)
- AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
- Subtitle support for SSA and SRT
We will install:
- FTP/SFTP/SSH Access – Transfer files to and from the AppleTV
- NitoTV – Play DVD files, enable USB storage and much more
- XBMC – A fully customizable media center software
- Boxee – Watch and share media with your friends
- Sapphire 6.5 – Play and organize media using IMDB database