New tech toy: AppleTV

First, a little background for the purchase. Initially I had a PC conntected to the TV that was running MediaPortal and acting as my file server with uTorrent running in the background. While it provided all the functionality I needed, MediaPortal had a tendency to either slow down the whole PC after being left on for long periods of time or crash. The other issue is the amount of electricity it used being left on all the time and being a full blown PC specification.

After a few months, I found out that I wasn’t really using the TV recording aspects as much as I thought so all I really needed was a fileserver that was a NAS and HTPC. The latter was solved when I installed an SVN version of XBMC (thanks to T3CH builds) on my softmodded Xbox and found that it could do 480p reasonably well. All I needed was a NAS drive and something that I could use as a torrent client.

Queue a lot of Googling and searching, the best I could find was the NSLU2 which was a hub for mass storage devices that could be connected to the network and shared the drives via Samba. Even better was that it could be flashed with custom firmware that allows the user to install 3rd party applications such as rTorrent.

I decided to buy the device and see what I could do with it and after a few days I managed to get what I needed out of the device, NAS and a torrent client using very little power (IIRC, about 25 watts including the external drive). However this success was short lived. The torrent client tended to crash and corrupt the filesystem when dealing with large files. This combined with the fact that the drive had to be formatted and partitioned a certain way for it to be used and the slow transfer speeds (even when wired) meant the whole thing seemed a bit pointless now.

However, on my search in attempting to fix this problem meant I came across other possible devices for the purposes I needed. The best out of the bunch was the AppleTV which could be patched via the USB port thanks to the guys at AwkwardTV. This meant I could install Samba, rTorrent and other plugins to play the various video formats of media I have in my collection. To sweeten the deal, it only used 18W on full load and was very quiet when running. A close second consideration was to buy another Xbox, upgrade the HDD and install Linux on it.

I promptly sold my NSLU2 to a friend who just needed the NAS capability and waited to buy an AppleTV on refurbishment. One eventually came up at 70% of the original price and I quickly snapped it up. A couple of days later, it is now happily running alongside the TV patched and playing my media collection. Below is a quick run through the steps I used to get going:

• Downloaded and used the ATV4Windows Patchstick for Take2
• Installed the commonly used binaries
• Installed Samba3
• Installed rTorrent
• Installed nitoTV
• Ran the codecs installer and Smart installer from nitoTV on the AppleTV

Generally, I am pretty pleased with the setup although I have found something that is very tempting literally a minute ago. The Wrath Series from EfficientPC are very cheap and look like they won’t use a lot of electricity during use could mean that I be considering going back to my first setup. It is even more tempting as MediaPortal are very close to a version 1 release which might fix the issues I was having before and it was a very nice setup with no hacking/patching needed since it would be running Windows.

Guess what I be pondering over for the next week .

XBMC updated

I have just upgraded XBMC on my Xbox after leaving it dormant for so long and was very surprised how much has been done since the last ‘stable’ release. H.264 support is much better and runs at full speed compared to the 8fps I got with the stable version. It has now made my large HTPC redundant.

Now all I need is a Xbox component cable and a NSLU2 and I can get rid of another PC. Time for some shopping on eBay me thinks.