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Hello
today I'm going to be showing you some things you can do
with an old First Generation Apple TV
and just perhaps you might even breathe some new life into it
Let's quickly look at the ports on the rear
you have a standard 2 prong AC power cable
a single USB port
10/100 ethernet
HDMI
component video
analog Audio
and optical audio
now it's worth mentioning that it does not officially
support composite video for older TVs
however, you can get black and white video by attaching
to the green connector here
and if you're really serious
there's actually a software hack that you can do
which will enable this port to actually output full-color composite video
Let's take a look at the guts of the Apple TV
it has an Intel Pentium M CPU running at 1 Gigahertz
it also has 256 megabytes of on-board RAM which is not upgradable
and for video it has an Nvidia GeForce Go 7300
it also came with your choice of a 40 or 160 gigabyte hard drive
I'd also like to point out that it is possible to use any ol' standard
DVI-capable computer monitor with your Apple TV
Which is what I'm going to be doing today
using an HDMI to DVI cable like this one
Just plug the HDMI into the apple TV and the other end into your DVI monitor
Since DVI does not have audio
You'll need to use regular audio cable like this one
and connect to the audio ports on the apple TV and into your monitor
I will also point out that if you go this route, you'll quickly discover that when you go to play movies
you'll hear sound but the picture will go black
and the reason for that is because most of the stuff you're going to download from iTunes
is going to have that stupid digital rights management bullcrap on it,
and the DVI connector
does not support the encryption method necessary to display that.
However that won't be a problem with what I'm going to be showing you here in a minute
So let's talk about the firmware
Technically it runs a specialized version of the macintosh OS 10.4.7
Now, with the original firmware it was designed primarily to play videos from your iTunes library
You could not run Netflix or Hulu or any other streaming video service other than YouTube or Vimeo
Alright, believe it or not I actually bought one of these when they first came out,
and I actually returned it to the store the next day.
And as neat as the device was the main feature it was lacking, for me, was it would not play
any files that I had recorded with digital cameras,
or ripped from DVDs.
Now you know I have decades worth of home videos
that have been recorded in a variety of formats
and then converted into MP4 files,
and you know I've got a lot of other videos that I had ripped from my own DVD collection
and I just, I just couldn't play them on there
without going through a very tedious process of
converting them all over into an iTunes friendly
format, and then importing them.
And not only would that be time consuming,
but it would lose a little bit of quality doing that
and I just, I just didn't want to do it
So instead I wound up buying a western Digital Live TV
because it offered this exact feature.
You could literally attach to any network share
in your house, and play just about any file format imaginable.
Plus it offers streaming media from places like Netflix and Hulu.
All right believe it or not today
There are at least two, possibly even three
alternative operating systems that you can run on your first generation Apple TV.
They're all free, they're open source. They're linux based,
and they can run completely from a USB stick
without modifying anything on the Apple TV
And I've already prepared this USB stick with
a product called OpenElec
Which is a, uh, basically runs xBMC,
and I'm going to show you how easy this is.
Just put it into the USB port and power cycle the Apple TV
It will boot straight into the openelec
And you can use the standard apple remote to control it.
The menus are very fast and responsive
And there are like a hundred different apps that you can install on this thing at the click of a button
But the best feature of this new firmware is that I can select a network share and pick
any sort of video file I want to play, and it will just play it without question.
So let me show you how easy it is to install an app on this thing.
So, let's say I want the Facebook media app,
which allows you to view all of the photos on your Facebook account.
Just click the app and then install and look it's already done!
And here's an example of one of the little games you can install:
It can be played with the mouse or the remote control
One thing you can do to make this thing easier to operate is to use a USB hub.
Sorry the Tardis hub is the only one I had handy that wasn't being used somewhere else.
So basically just plug the hub into your USB port,
and then you can put your USB flash drive into the hub
now you have enough ports available to connect a mouse and a keyboard.
As you can see the mouse actually works perfectly and
even the scroll wheel works
The keyboard certainly speed things up when you need to type something in,
especially compared to using the on-screen keyboard.
Now the only downside to these open-source operating systems
is that they will still not allow you to play Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu,
and the reason is simple: because those are
proprietary streaming services and they would require
a proprietary closed-source application
to handle that and because this is open source, we're likely to never see
that feature available ,which is unfortunate
and the great thing is you can just remove the USB stick whenever you're done
and your Apple TV will go back to being exactly like it was before.
Now, if you decide that you really
like the new operating system,
and you have no desire to use the original anymore,
you can actually overwrite the hard drive so that,
so the apple TV will boot up straight to the new operating system
without having to use your USB port for that,
and even if you decide later that you don't want that
it's not that difficult to restore
the hard drive back to the factory firmware
you can download, well there's several different ways
to do it, but the way I did is I downloaded
a program called apple pie
and, uh apple pie was actually meant for writing images designed for the raspberry Pi
But it will also do usb images and will put anything you want on there
and I actually created a
USB stick that has the original Apple firmware
which you can download on the internet by the way
And you can just blast it right back on there
So I actually played around a little bit with trying to get a linux desktop
running like a minimal form of ubuntu or something like that on this machine
and, um, you know I was hoping maybe I could do something with it
like make MAME machines or play emulated arcade games or something like that on it
but, um,
one of the problems I ran into is that it has 256 megs of RAM
and it's very difficult to get anything done with 256 megs of RAM with modern-day software
and, um, you know even the raspberry pi has 512 megs so
I would venture to say that it is possible
if someone smarter than me wanted to make
a Linux desktop distribution that would run on the Apple TV
and um, actually have like you know some games and stuff that you could play
I think it can be done
but I'm just not quite smart enough to do it
The one last thing I will mention about this thing is it does get hot
I actually measured it at one point
just the top surface of the device at 117 degrees
so uh make sure you put this thing up in a ventilated area
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