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.

well what have I been upto. On Friday we where in Manchester to see the Defenders of the Faith II tour and one of my favourite bands Lamb Of God. It was an amazing night, but a punch in the guts in many respects. For one, the train cost a fortune. As we couldnt get a return to manchester from St Helens (go figure) we essentially had to get 4 single tickets. This cost us £30 for a 30 mile journey. To put it in perspective to go 30 miles in the other direction to liverpool would have cost us £7 return. After going days and days without spending a single penny, this cost was excessive, and almost enough for me to write it off and come home without going to the gig, but hell, we work hard we deserve a night out.

So into Manchester, and what a shock. It was like venturing into a parallel universe as opposed to the city we lived in for 7 years. The people where all about the fashion, it was so overcrowded, and the money being spent was insane.

The cost of everything got to me that day, the cost of a 2 minute taxi ride and entry into a club to meet our friends £10, a light snack £4, a pint of beer £3. The cost of city living has skyrocketed and it’s only when you step back and away from it you realise how absurd the whole thing is. We both hated the city for that day we spent there, we have either outgrown it or it has outgrown us! The only saving graces where that the bands where great, and Lee & Rachel where awesome, and their appartment was superb. Lee also grabbed us meal deal vouchers for Pizza Express so we all had starters, main courses and beer, and the total bill came to £40 for 4 people. Awesome.

I’m still not spending, and now I’m 41 days in give or take, it feels no different. I was almost tempted at the prospect of building a media centre PC. I resisted, dug out my old xboxs, and a few old Hard Drives and set them all up with XBMC. So now I have 3 working Media Centres, all networked and ready to go. Result & recycling!

I’ll start posting again properly for the next few weeks, just been a crazy busy time of late.

Latest Picture of my Xbox setup.

And a Macro of the xbox & Chip controller.

I started Xbox hacking back in October 2004. I bought a Crystal Xbox for £100. I wanted to get an older model due to the more complex chipping procedure of the 1.6 motherboards in new machines but after aloof thought I decided to go with the new crystal machine. I then purchased a Xecuter 2.6 Mod chip from Kaneaction who offered a great service. The mod chip fitting itself was a nightmare. Took me almost 4 hours to make all the solder points and rebuild the LPC . Also, I lost one of the copper tracks (the heat from the soldering iron destroyed the track) so I had to rebuild the track using wire. After the chip was installed i ripped out the original 8GB Western Digital HD and fitted a 250gb Samsung drive . I then booted the Xbox from Slayers Evox Boot disk and installed Evox, avalaunch & XBMC.

Just recently I removed Evox and set the new CVS build of XBMC as my main dashboard. This was for many reasons but mainly the fact that I use the Xbox more as a media centre of late than a gaming machine. I am able to play Divx and DVD on the xbox from my armchair using the remote, I have the Xbox networked to my media server for watching films. I also have my entire MP3 collection on the Xbox hard disk(about 100GB of MP3). This allows the xbox to be used as a stand-alone Jukebox with a great UI. The new builds of XBMC also allow python scripting. I have a script which random plays a play list when the Xbox boots, so I just turn the machine on and music plays. I also have Game trailers & Move trailers streamed directly to the Xbox for my viewing. Perhaps the best script I use is the Yahoo! Launch script, which streams almost every single music video to the xbox on demand at high res. Like MTV, without the adverts and crap music vids. Similar to this is the shoutcast scripting which allows thousands of free streaming radio stations to be played back. The scripts I use are included below

Yahoo Launch Script here

Quicktime Move trailers here

Game trailers here

My own autoexec and randomplay scripts here (place autoexec in XBMC route and the randomplay scripts in the scripts folder) (Edit the autoexec and randomplay files in notepad to represent your file structure)

Below are some screenshots of XBMC

My XBMC Main Menu

My System Info pane

My games uploaded onto the xbox

XBMC playing a selection of mpeg music videos

Music Videos Current Playlist

Main Menu overlayed over video

Weather.com Weather info for me.

Configuration screen.