Hacking the AppleTV without opening the case

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Hacking the AppleTV(without opening the case)
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So you just bought an AppleTV

• What can it do?
• Watch clips and movie trailers
• Play videos and music from your iTunes Library on
  your HDTV
• Thats pretty much about it
• Some specs
• 40GB or 160GB of storage
• 802.11 Wi-Fi
• HDMI component outputs
• 299.00 - 399.00

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But, we would like to do more!

• GOAL
• Get external storage working
• Get non-supported video formats to play on the
  AppleTV
• WHY?
• AppleTV clearly doesnt have enough storage to
  store all our movies/DVD-rips
• iTunes doesnt play .avi files
• Apparently, not many illegal file-sharers rip
  into MPEG-4 (but, we wouldnt know anything
  about that)

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Prerequisites

• An Intel Mac.
• Perian (Optional, but necessary for playing AVI
  files)
• A USB drive (at least 1GB)
• Download Patchstick

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Whats our next step?

• Getting SSH onto the AppleTV
• Run Patchstick from Intel Mac
• Patchstick is a script that formats the USB into
  a bootable volume and copies necessary binaries
  from a working installation of Mac OS X
• Patchstick installs AwkwardTV
• AwkwardTV provides a menu option to enable SSH on
  the AppleTV
• Run through of using Patchstick

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Step by Step Instructions
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What the AppleTV does now

• Plays video files that iTunes does not support
  (any .avi encoded video files)
• Can mount a Network Attached Storage using NFS
  (AppleTV storage space is no longer an issue)

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The AppleTV h4x02z

• Zach Bischof
• Greg Bok
• Hagai Livini
• Paul Wang