Church Tech Dump

Now I continue on with building a digital signage solution with an AppleTV. There seems to be some interest in the project. Thanks to those who commented on the intro post.

In this post I will discuss the steps taken to prepare the AppleTV for the rest of the abuse that we’ll put it through. It took me forever to complete the steps below due to a bit of trial and error, locating hard to find software, and working on a project involving the type of tinkering that I had not done before. Let’s get started:

1. Unlock your AppleTV’s potential
   The first thing you’ll need to do is jailbreak your AppleTV. There are a lot of ways to do this. But unless you’ve done it before, you will find it worth your time and money to use the handy software provided at atvflash.com($50). Using this software, you’ll skip ahead quite a bit by not only jailbreaking your device in a super simple way, but you’ll avoid the hassle of having to install the Webkit web browser on your device. This app will do it for you.
2. Enable Flash (get a headache)
   This part gave me the most trouble but it would have been a sinch if I was certain I was using the right tools. You need to enable Flash Player on the AppleTV. If you are using ATV Flash, then all you need to do is find the ChoreAudioKit.framework from a Mac OSX 10.4.10 (intel) installation, and upload it to your AppleTV using an FTP client or Terminal. Then run the Install Flash utility found in your AppleTV’s maintinence menu. Boom! Now when browsing the internet on your AppleTV, Flash will work instead of showing you a blue Lego with a question mark. Like I said, this was hard for me because I thought I had the right version of ChoreAudioKit.framework so when it did not work, I destroyed my brain trying to figure out what was going wrong. Finally I double checked my version of the framework and realized my mistake. It MUST be from OSX 10.4.10 (intel). Has to be the version for the Intel processors and has to be the dot-ten version. Dot-ten is not the same as dot-one! Less (but still) vague instructions on this step are found here. Let me know if you have any trouble with this step.
3. Set the system clock
   For reasons that will become clear in a later post, it is important for you to make sure your AppleTV’s system clock is set to your local time zone. I don’t remember what the time zone was set to when I got to this step in my own work. But it was not US Central Standard, so I had to change it. At this point you will need to launch the Terminal app on your Mac and then login via SSH to your AppleTV (your Mac and AppleTV should be on the same network). You should then follow the instructions found here. To many of you, this might make sense. For me, this was the first time I really used Terminal for anything so I was a little intimidated, but it all worked out pretty easily.

That’s it! Your AppleTV already does some pretty sweet tricks what with Flash enabled internet browsing and Boxee on it! Good times.

Have fun playing with its new features while I get together the next post where I introduce more pieces to the puzzle and then begin to piece it all together.