I’ve always used XBMC (now Kodi) since it’s birth, even before when it was Xbox Media Player & my family have become accustomed to how everything works. It works wonderfully for our needs & we now don’t have any subscription TV services (granted we download TV episodes but we have a TV license & could watch them for free on our set top box so hardly a crime). We also convert all our DVD’s into .mp4/.m4v/.mkv files so we can watch them without going to find the disk.

I really love the XBMC (kodi) on the jailbroken ATV2 and it’s served me well for almost 2 years, but I have a few gripes with it. Firstly it’s reliant on a jailbreak, which isn’t ideal. Secondly, whilst videos play perfectly due to hardware acceleration available in the ATV2, the menus are certainly not as snappy or responsive as they are on XBMC (kodi) on our macs. This is understandable as the ATV2 is essentially an ipod touch without the screen. Also it tends to lock up using addons such as streaming video addons & can’t handle 720p Xvid or Divx files. So I went on the hunt for an alternative. It came in the form of an original 1st Generation Apple TV.

This box is a low powered computer with a 1ghz mobile intel processor, 256mb ram and a 40GB hard drive (it is available with a 160GB drive but as my stuff is all stored on a NAS it’s not required). It includes a Nvidia graphics chip and a wide array of I/O ports.

As standard the Apple TV is really showing it’s age. It’s slow & can just about display some types of 720p files using XBMC (kodi). As such it is not an ideal candidate for a modern 1080p media centre. However, if you head over to eBay and purchase a Broadcom BCM970012 Hardware HD Video Decoder Card this low powered computer becomes a media powerhouse. I purchased the following card for £14 and it’s a worthy purchase .

To fit the card you open up the case (4 torx screws) and remove the pre-installed wifi card. This will leave your Apple TV with Ethernet only, unless you add a USB wifi dongle which is possible, but for 1080p content I would really recommend an ethernet setup. You then install the Broadcom card in the wifi cards place & you are good to go.

Now there are drivers available for the standard Apple TV software. You will need to use Firecore’s ATV Flash software to create a patchstick. You can then install XBMC (kodi) and the CrystalHD drivers from the new maintenance menu. As I said before the Apple TV is showing it’s age & the native menus are very clunky & slow. This is where 3rd party Linux distros come into place.

You have 2 options, Crystalbuntu by Sam Nazarko or Openelec. I used Crystalbuntu for a good few days & it is flawless, however the installation procedure is a little harder & Sam (the developer) seems to be concentrating support more on Crystalbuntu for Raspberry Pi. I have since switched to OpenELEC 2.0 (RC 1) – 1.99.1 ATV i386 and I’m really impressed.

To install openelec is a breeze. You will need a USB flash drive, I used a Sandisk Cruzer 16GB drive.

Installation instructions for Apple TV are available here.

Installation is a breeze. Just make sure you have the Apple TV connected via Ethernet. The Patchstick will partition the internal HDD and you will lose the native Apple TV OS – no big deal. It will then automatically download the latest available version and install openelec XBMC. This is essentially a highly customised version of Linux with only the required files to boot on Apple TV, and only the required drivers for the hardware. Footprint is a couple of hundred Meg.

Post installation you will have a fast booting & extremely responsive XBMC installation. The Broadcom CrystalHD drivers will be installed automatically & selected for Hardware Acceleration in XBMC.

Now simply add your media sources & build your library. This is a really fast media centre & will play anything I throw at it. I can watch my 1080p blu ray rips with ease & stutter free. Truly a wonderful addition to our media centre collection.

The Openelec install also has various options in settings so you can configure wifi (either built in if you opt not to install a broadcom card, or USB dongle wifi if you so wish).

The openelec install is self updating (set to auto update in openelec settings) & comes with Samba setup so you can access the Media Centre from any machine on your network, making it easy to copy files, access logs, change keymaps or mess with advancedsettings.xml

This truly is a great media centre setup & I cant beleive all in it cost less than an ATV3 for so much more than that box is capable of.

The next mod maybe is to install a larger HDD or even an SSD. I’m also tempted to get a few more Apple TV’s to mod as media centres to replace the ATV2’s I have. The connectivity & openness of the system is brilliant, as is the tiny footprint & speed of the media centre. It’s so far proved to be rock solid. Boot time from power on is around 15 seconds & power consumption under full load is around 23 Watts, measured with a Kill-a-watt. It’s not relaint on Jailbreaks & the Openelec project is constantly improving with each beta & release candidate.

My advice to any XBMC fans it to test this route out. It’s a handsome box, the optical audio out & connectivity is a real bonus & the UI responsiveness makes this one of the most frugal Media Centres I’ve ever built. I intend to build a Raspberry PI XBMC but I’m told the UI is still a little clunky so I’ll be sure to make a few more ATV XBMC’s.

The real benefits of the atv2 is hardware decoding of h264 so all my 1080p MKVs play perfectly without any lag. They play over hdmi to my Hd tv so everything looks great. I now have 2 apple tvs setup to use a central MySQL database for xbmc and all my movies & TV shows are stored on a central server. This means all my machines and media centres are in sync. I can stop watching something in the living room and resume in the bedroom, or in the office, and there is no duplication.

This setup is superb, but now I see the Raspberry PI and I’m wondering if it can overcome the only limitation of my setup, the hardware limitations of 720p output from the apple tv. This isn’t a major issue as I only have a 32 inch HDTV, but I’m always curious. I won’t update Tvs until they die, it’s a waste of money and resources. 720p is more than sufficient for this screen size but there is always that what if, what if I can build a machine using a Raspberry PI for £22 with 1080p hardware decoding of MKVs.

I tried to get a couple on the release date but they sold out so quick. I’m thinking about buying 4. 2 will become media centres and the other two will become a cheap NAS & web server to put all my retired HDDs in and run php, MySQL and a backup server.

I still need to come up with an inexpensive case for these machines, and I would really like to recycle something to create the cases. I’m tempted to put the media centre in old console cases, such as a snes case for a retro feel, but I may just fabricate something to VESA mount on the back of the TVs. I also need to figure out a good remote, I might go the USB dongle route, as you can buy the dongles in the pound shop, and the remotes are cheap as chips from china or hong kong on eBay. I also need to figure out how best to build the Linux image for the media centres. It will need to be stripped right back to use as few resources as possible and run xbmc only.

I’m still wanting to see what kind of power consumption eh can manage, with the ATV2 managing 2-5 watts draw between idle and max, I’m not sure if anything will come close. The power consumption is a big issue now as I plan to run all out computers & servers, not to mention the media centres on renewable energy. I’ve already got plans to build a wind turbine from recycle parts and some fabricated parts, and I’m going to buy some solar PV panels to roof mount at our new house. This means that we can work for free, after the initial outlay for the parts and building. That means every bit of kit I buy has to be a trade off between power and power consumption. The iMac never uses more than 120watts, the MacBook peaks at 60watts and the apple tvs at 5watts each. I have a few external HDDs which use just over 10 watts each and with the TV at 240watts I’m looking at requiring a pretty constant 500 watts which is excellent. If I can produce more I may use a feed in tariff or even power what I can of e rest of the house from it. But that’s a different blog post.

Well this blog was supposed to focus on the project in hand, but as I haven’t yet been able to get any raspberry PI boards that will need to wait for the next post. I’ll keep you up to date with this project.