It’s rare that I set my mind to a small task and fail utterly, but that’s what just happened. It all started when I bought a Time Capsule for my house. Hm, I thought to myself - I can plug in a hard drive and use it as a NAS. So I plugged in a 500gb hard drive - easy, worked fine. My laptop doesn’t have 802.11n - I wonder if I’ll be able to stream sub-720p video from the Time Capsule-attached hard drive? Yes, as it turned out, I could.
Then I thought hey, maybe I should get an AppleTV, do that USB key hack thing, and instead of watching those video streams on my laptop I can watch them on TV. So (and three people who read this blog are going to understand the details of this; I’m sorry, but it all ends in a moral lesson sort of)
- I went to Fry’s and bought an AppleTV
- I updated the ATV’s software to 2.0, or Take Two, as Apple calls it
- I assembled all the software components (Tiger, 10.4.9, ATV update, etc.) and brewed a patchstick
- I ran the patchstick - success
- I SSHed into the ATV from my Mac and installed DIVX and Windows Media codecs, plus ATVFiles (a filesystem browser)
- I copied a test AVI into a “Movie” directory on the ATV; it played
- oh my god, almost there, I thought
- Then I was like wait a minute - how do I access that Time Capsule-attached hard drive? I thought ATVFiles would sniff it somehow, but apparently not
- I called Louis, who suggested I use the Airport Utility to give the disk a username and password, and determine its AFP address - Louis knows everything
- So I SSHed into the ATV and was all like la la la
sudo mount_afp afp://on:demand@Litwack-Time-Capsule.local. ~/frontrow/Movies/afp - The ATV returned “mount_afp: command not found.”
- Command not found? It turned out Apple stripped AFP filesystem extensions from the ATV kernel after 1.0. There were instructions for putting them back, but besides their moderate complexity, I didn’t want to be the first person to try it under ATV 2.0.
- Then I looked into the possibility of using SMB instead of AFP - installing Sharity3 on the ATV and going from there
- but then I took a deep breath and thought: fuck it.
I could get this to work if my life depended on it - downgrading to ATV 1.0 and writing a little XML file for ATV-ShareMounter would probably do it. But GOOD GOD, I personally HIT A WALL here. This was a failure, a total, personal failure. Even worse, reviewing what went wrong, I realize it exposes a failure to plan - I should have sidestepped all of this horror by looking at my desired outcome (video streaming off a NAS to a TV) and bought something actually suited to the task instead of trying to use a fork as a spoon. I’m a nerd, but not the kind of nerd who bashes things around just for the hell of it. I like solving problems, and MAN did I lose sight of my horizon.
I feel like crying.
god damn you
7 Comments
C’mon, how about some cognitive restructuring here? “Total, personal failure”? “Small task”?
I don’t know, I just haven’t hit a wall like that in a long time. I wanted to remember the moment.
I hear ya. I would be embarrassed to admit to anyone how many hours I spent this past weekend trying to get SSH installed. I couldn’t get the Patchstick to work at all, then I removed the drive and couldn’t get it to work and then I went back to the first tutorial for Patchstick. There was one detail missing that would have saved me hours and hours of my time, but I had figured it out. Three attempts and I had a ready Patchstick. I’m keeping that USB key and never deleting what’s on it now that it works.
It’s sad Apple was bullied by the Film and TV networks into putting such measures into their products, but couldn’t they have left a hole here and there. I couldn’t believe that even Apple Remote Desktop 2 or 3 wouldn’t connect to it. Kept giving a ‘not supported’ error when trying to connect to the AppleTV through ARD. Crazy.
I want to have the AppleTV connect to a drive I have connected to my iMac that holds all my video. My XBox360 can already stream that stuff through a cool app called ‘Connect360′, but I wanted to use the AppleTV for that kind of thing ’cause I like the interface/YouTube/screensaver photo show.
I do Mac Support for a living and I’m having as much trouble and as frustrated so don’t feel like a failure. And thanks for letting me vent.
I use my appletv primarily as a paperweight awaiting a stable linux build after going through these sorts of headaches time in and time out. I should also have done my homework and read the device was intended really only to be a portal to apple purchased itunes certified purchased through itunes as long as its itunes content.
Considering the pricepoint of the unit I think smb support, easy plugin codec support, and the freedom to escape apple’s limited view of .mov, I mean media content would make it a very attractive and flexible front end.
There is a subtle but key difference between supporting and suggesting a particular media configuration, and requiring it. The former makes a good device potentially better, the latter makes a good device potentially better for a subset of the market and a frustratingly unsuitable device to the rest. It feels like Apple is taking a ‘if you don’t like our way, don’t buy our products’ stand which really offends me as a long time apple user who has suffered necessary compatibility struggles and is now forcefed unnecessary ones :(.
Looks like linux can turn this brick into a mythbox tho
Hi, uh, Frank,
Yeah, the AppleTV is at best a modest success - certainly not a home run - and an analogue tells the story: imagine an iPod without mp3 support. The video codecs iTunes supports are not the ones in widest use.
In the future I think there’s a case for consumers buying season passes to shows and renting movies over the wire a la carte instead of paying a monthly fee for a cable firehose of content, and that would be where the ATV comes in. But the market for weirdos with TBs of video in various formats on servers who want to stream that content to a box hooked up to a big TV (like me)…very small. I don’t particularly begrudge Apple their attempt; I just feel dumb for thinking this was a smart platform to try to hack. That said, good luck with Linux!
Alice in Googleland dumped me on this blog entry. I bought an AppleTV and thought I’d get into hacking it, but was put off by reading the same things as you guys reported. One dude suggested using VisualHub. I’ve been using that for six months or so and it makes the AppleTV delightful. It feels a little dirty transcoding shit all the time, but in truth I don’t notice when I’m watching. I just drop all kinds of random video files on it and they end up in iTunes and sync’ed to the AppleTV. I don’t get any hacker brownie points, but I can always find another way to accumulate those.
Hey Pablos,
Whatever works, I say. I don’t think VisualHub would have been a good solution for me (although I use it all the time for other things) but now that I think about it if you wanted those hacker points I bet you could set up a little applescript to transcode incoming video files or something.