Mon, 28 May 2007

ARCO Commercial: Underground City in 1991

Back in the 1970's, ARCO painted a pretty grim picture for life in the year 1991. You remember 1991? When everyone was forced to go live in the underground city? It didn't really end up happening, and we owe a world of thanks to ARCO Petroleum for saving our way of life above the surface.

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AppleTV Hacks

I felt a little guilty doing it, but I tore into the AppleTV on Sunday. It was very painless. I partially peeled back the rubber mat, used the T8 on the 4 screws, and then peeled it back a little further for the 4 T10 screws that held the hard drive in place. Popped it into the USB-IDE shell I bought for $10 at Frys, which powered the drive just fine off the USB bus. Two partitions showed up -- "OSBoot" and somehing like "Media". The simplest method for hacking the drive is to copy over sshd from an intel OSX mac and a configuration file to make it run at startup.

The hack didn't work at first because I copied the plist file directly off my laptop. I don't have SSH enabled, so thats probably why it didn't work. I used another xml file i found on a AppleTV wiki and that did the trick.

Because of the sshd binary i used, I can only do ssh v1 (ssh -1 [host]). You login as "frontrow" and "frontrow". There is a silly challenge/response at first, just ignore that and enter the password. At this point, I could sudo and do whatever I wanted on the box. Note that the OS partition is mounted as read only by default. mount -uw / and mount -ur / are your friends here to mount writable and read-only, respectively.

I really don't like spending lots of time h4x0ring the AppleTV in a shell...its kinda irritating. Thats why the first (and last) plugin I manually installed as the Awkward TV loader. This shows up right on the main menu and lets you load and unload various plugins published on the awkward TV plug-in site. This plugin reads an RSS feed to determine the lastest plugins and lets you load them right on the box with your remote. After the installation is complete, it soft resets the box (probably just restarts FrontRow) and you are set with your plugin.

My most favorite plugin so far is the "Series of Tubes" plugin. This lets you watch YouTube in all its overcompressed 320x240 glory on your HDTV. The plugin does some smart things in the background, including prefetching and caching of YouTube videos as you browse "Featured" and various "Most Viewed/Discussed/etc" top rankings before you even get a chance to start watching.

The only unfortunate thing is that there is no way to login as yourself and watch subscribed content or browse much further beyond the preset filters. But I am certain its only a matter of time before this is resolved. Its only on version 1.0.1. "A Series of Tubes" is also remarkably stable for the second release. "Series of Tubes" requires the Perian codec pack (you might need to copy these right into the quicktime directory using SCP).

Other plugins include Omelette, which is sort of a shiney egg bejewelled 3-in-a-row game. "Streamer", a very basic streaming audio application, mplayer wrappers so you can play your DVDs, a perl engine for FrontRow, etc. They all seamlessly work with FrontRow, just adding yet another cute menu item on the spinny display.

Lastly, I am really enjoying all of that 720p "HD Podcast" content available. There is some pretty good stuff available that I have found. The video quality is great...which was a real shocker. Offline content delivered to your HDTV is definately a killer app in its self, assuming the content is rich enough for anyone to want to view it. Its tough finding non-techie shows though....even if its some bouncy hottie rambling on about RSS feeds.

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