By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
The introduction of the new AppleTV all but renders the previous hard-drive model obsolete. You can still buy and rent movies and TV shows from iTunes but no more software updates means the old AppleTV's wont be getting Netflix and their use outside the iTunes ecosystem is pretty much dead in the water. Thankfully, Boxee exists and it is free and easy enough to install, we show you how.
Like many AppleTV adopters, I feel disillusioned that Apple abandoned their original "hobby" set-top box when they launched the new one a few months ago. A nice software update wouldn't have cost them anything but seeing that the new AppleTV is running on a different OS (iOS instead of the previous OS X derivative) is the possible reason for this limitation.
Older AppleTV's are being sold second hand on eBay and are also on clearance in Apple's Online Store for $170 for the 160GB version.
We're not interested in buying the new AppleTV, its lack of full-HD capability plus the streaming-only model doesn't really fly with us. We like collecting and keeping our shows and movies on a hard drive for instantaneous, bandwidth-free playback whenever we want. Our only option after Apple discontinued software updates to the 1st gen AppleTV was to look elsewhere and thankfully Boxee answered our prayers.
Boxee is an open-source home-theater PC OS that, while still in beta, allows users to avail of a number of great features missing on the AppleTV. You can, for example, play almost any type of media wirelessly from your PC or Mac without having to re-encode it in Apple-friendly format. This means all your previous video and audio files are decoded on the fly and you can watch them instantaneously.
Boxee is also tied in to a lot of TV shows and Movies that are available for free. This are streaming shows that aren't exactly HD quality but the selection is there and hopefully it will grow. Boxee also has the advantage of running apps specific to content like Pandora, MLB Baseball and others. It doesn't yet offer a Netflix application but we've researched and that is definitely in the works.
Installing Boxee on AppleTV
Installing Boxee on AppleTV is easy and generally harmless. You aren't replacing the AppleTV interface but you are adding to it. Installing Boxee on a first generation AppleTV will void the warranty but seeing as many of the first generation models are probably out of warranty, it is viable option (plus you can always reset AppleTV to its factory settings should things go horribly wrong).
Here are the instructions from Boxee's website:
Installing Boxee on an AppleTV will require three things:
- a computer running Mac OS X or Windows XP/Vista
- a USB flash drive which will work as a patchstick
- an AppleTV
Here are a couple of video tutorials that will walk though this process:
Not all USB flash drives will work to patch the AppleTV but there is an AppleTV Flash Drive Compatibility List (forum thread here).
Once you've obtained a flash drive you'll need to download the most recent version of atvusb-creator.
Making the patchstick
- Insert a "bootable" USB drive into your PC/Mac
- Run the ATVUSB-Creator
- Click on Create Using or Create Patchstick
- Remove the USB drive and plug it into your Apple TV
Installing
- Power on your Apple TV and the patchstick will run the ATV bootloader
- After the bootloader finishes, remove it and restart your Apple TV
- It now has options for Boxee / XBMC on the main menu
- Click on Boxee, then select update launcher and then update Boxee Beta
- Once Boxee is done installing, restart your Apple TV
- Click Boxee
- Boxee will start
- Now go to first time use to continue the installation process
Here's a helpful video we used from Dave Matthews of Boxee
Our Experience
We only experienced problems using a cheap USB drive that wasn't compatible for some reason. After changing this to a Kingston USB thumbdrive, all was okay. The scariest part was installing and seeing all that code appear on screen, but once that was done and we rebooted, we never looked back.
Using Boxee on the first gen AppleTV has been a good experience and has provided us numerous options of things to watch. Being in Canada the amount of content is, as always, limited. The best part for us was being able to watch all the stuff we archived on our iMac wirelessly to our HDTV via Boxee in AppleTV. Simply find the file and play it- Boxee takes care of converting it all. You can create queues for things you want to watch and you can watch tons of web content directly on your HDTV via live streaming.
Boxee, being still in beta, may have issues. We've had it crash a couple of times but this just takes you back to AppleTV's menu, it is easy enough to restart from there. One major crash, which froze everything just required the AppleTV to be unplugged and plugged back in, everything worked fine after that. The best thing is that Boxee frees up the hard drive space on the AppleTV since it is either streaming from the web of from your PC or Mac.