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Apple TV Booting off External USB

After initial reports of hacking the Apple TV to play other formats such as XviD, work has continued surrounding the original Something Awful forum thread about how to get further functionality out of the Apple TV.

Users have been able to run various apps (World of Warcraft, VLC, Firefox) remotely through VNC. Other efforts reveal that the Apple TV does respond to an external keyboard.

The most significant step at this stage has been the ability to boot the Apple TV from an external USB drive. A video demos the external USB drive on an (essentially) unmodified Apple TV.

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64 months ago
http://appletvhacks.net/

http://www.ozy.us/stuff/ExternalBootOnAppleTV.mov

Of course it still requires you to pull the drive out to make the image.

EDIT: It does however open the door to being able to gain access to the device without cracking the case.

B
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64 months ago
Yeah, great stuff, 'ey? :)

To add a little more specific details:

The AwkwardTV project is working on building a bootable image based on the Open Source Darwin kernel. If successful, booting the modified Darwin image via an external USB drive would would allow mounting and editing of the internal hard disk, and permit the various hacks, such as enabling SSH, to be installed/enabled without opening the case.
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64 months ago
so one computer, multiple locations of mac access around the house?

sweet.
r
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64 months ago
Holy crap. This is cool. It's almost like Apple wanted us to snoop around and start hacking this thing.

Currently, this is the least inexpensive Mac you can buy. :p

I can't wait to see what people have in store for this odd little contraption.
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64 months ago
Quick work, the more this thing gets "modded" the more i am thinking about buying one.


(At this stage i have no need at all to buy one, my current telly 14" CRT is a lot smaller than my iMac 20" with eyeTV and all my content already on the iMac)
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64 months ago
So the usb port has more use than just maintenance by Apple. :D
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64 months ago
Excellent. If done properly, then, one could, for all intents and purposes, make all sorts of mods to the Apple TV via external drive without even affecting the internal drive, so that, if booted without the external, it would revert to original behavior. No warranty issues at all. Cool.
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64 months ago
and lets not forget about resolution independance in the next os...

the finder would not look so bad at hd video resolutions if for res independance...

every tv in the house is a head for your desktop with itv... i think thats cooler then booting off hd..

r.
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64 months ago
Why on his AppleTV is he using the Yellow(composite) port(for vidoe)? AppleTV only support Red, Blue and Green(component) for Video(audio is the same on both)

He even say "use standard component" but the cord is 3(2 for audio) 1 yellow for vidoe, which is composite.


Here a pic if you don't want to watch the vidoe
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64 months ago
I posted in a previous thread that I was surprised someone didn't figure out how to boot linux on it within one day. I'm a bit disappointed in all you hackers out there... and i thought you were making progress... it takes you guys about a week?

where is that melvin guy from War Games, he can do it... :D
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