existentia

For the last six months or so, I’ve had a £199 small box sitting under my TV doing next to nothing. Yes, I made a impulse purchase of the 40GB Apple TV device and immediately felt some remorse. I did have an idea of what the Apple TV was capable of, but I didn’t realise it was so limited out-of-the-box.

The reason I purchased it was that my old, hulking home-built media centre PC gave up the ghost some time ago and I wanted something to replace it. That machine was running Windows Vista and used Windows Media Center to playback all the video and audio content I had (which sits separately on a NAS device) as well as record and playback digital TV. It was all hooked up to my HD television and 5.1 surround-sound system and for the most part, worked pretty well.

I knew I would be sacrificing any TV recording/playback capability with choosing the Apple TV, but that didn’t bother me as I rarely watch TV these days. However, I assumed it would be able to playback my existing video content sitting on my NAS device (mostly in Xvid and DivX format) in addition to all the music I had, as well as a handful of video podcasts and music tracks I had download from the iTunes store. I was wrong…or was I?

Like the iPod, Apple is very restrictive in what file formats it will playback on the Apple TV. In short, if it isn’t downloaded from the iTunes store then it is unlikely to play unless you first convert the file into a format that iTunes will support. For video files this usually means first converting them to the MPEG-4 format or better quality H.264 format. Which when you have gigabytes of video content can be a very time consuming process and that’s not to mention the degradation in quality you get when performing such tasks (transcoding).

But the Apple TV is just running a cut-down version of Mac OS X using Front Row as a front-end, isn’t it? Surely support for these video files could be added? Well, yes it could. Apple could add support easily if they so desired, but that is unlikely to happen while the iTunes store remains open. And so the user community has had to work it out for themselves and now a few options are available for those feeling brave enough to do a bit of Apple TV “modification”.

And so, with a spare USB drive in hand, I’ve tried a couple of “home-made” solutions to this problem. I’ve tried both ATVPatch and ATVFlash which both actually cost me money to try (I’m still confused as to the legality of actually being able to charge for something like this!) and they were partially what I was looking for. They provided me with the applications to playback the video formats I use, but it was the connecting to my NAS device on my home wireless network that often proved either impossible or that when the video playback did begin, it just wasn’t reliable.

However, a few days ago I made a great discovery that has really brought my Apple TV back to life. It all came about when I discovered an open-source project called Boxee which only very recently announced support for the Apple TV. I’ve signed up to test the alpha version (yes, it’s very early in development!) so I can’t actually use it yet until they give me a login (they are staggering the sign-ups to make sure they don’t get overrun with new users). However, I then also discovered that Boxee is built upon another open-source project called XBMC (X-Box Media Center).

And so using the excellent ATV USB Creator utility on my Macbook, I created a new USB “patch stick” which includes the XBMC and Boxee software as well as a launcher for them. I plugged the USB drive it into my Apple TV (I’m running v2.2 of the Apple TV software) and rebooted the device in order to perform the installation. You unfortunately need to yank out the power code to reboot the device at this stage (rather than down arrow + menu on the remote). After the second reboot, you should see XBMC and Boxee options in your Apple TV menu along with all the other usual options.

And XBMC really is the dog’s bollocks. It pretty much makes the Apple TV capable of everything I want from a media center (short of recording TV and playing back DVDs – both of which the Apple TV is currently physically unable to do). The playback of all my videos and music (regardless of file format!) from my NAS device is now possible and completely jitter free. The XBMC front-end is much more colourful and informative than the functional yet boring default Front Row interface. I believe XBMC even makes it possible to download and playback Torrents directly from your Apple TV through the use of additional plug-ins (which can add lots of other functionality and skins for the interface). All in all it is a very impressive application and one that can be easily quit from so you can return to the regular Apple TV interface at any time. A great find – Apple take note!

Like many people, I recently downloaded and installed the Mac OS 10.4.10 update via Software Update onto my Apple MacBook. All appeared to be well except for one apparent bug this update has introduced into the system. Many other users are reporting this same problem but Apple have yet to address this issue (it appears to have got fixed is Mac OS 10.5). In the hope of helping a few other people out with this I will detail the problems I’ve experienced and what I’ve done to workaround them.

First of all, I would only ever see this problem in the following scenario:

• My MacBook is running on battery (i.e. it’s not plugged into the mains)
• My MacBook is connected to my home wireless network that is encrypted using either WPA+WPA2 mixed mode or just WPA2. My Belkin N1 Wireless Modem Router offers me both these options as well as the older WEP encryption modes.

The problems I experienced were the same most other people have been reporting. Frequently (every 10 – 15 minutes or so) my wireless connection would just drop. Sometimes Mac OS thought it was still connected to the wireless network even though I couldn’t access any web sites etc. Switching the Airport card off and then back on again from within Mac OS appeared to the resolve the issue, albeit temporary. What was troubling and much more irritating is that after a few of these drop-outs Mac OS would kernel panic (i.e. hang completely). Following the required reboot the crash report would always point the finger at the Airport wireless card driver (com.apple.driver.AirPort.Atheros).

From what I can work out this problem seems to be with the updated driver used by the Airport card (that must be installed by the Mac OS 10.4.10 update) and how it handles specifically configured WPA and WPA2 encrypted wireless networks. The fact this problem does not appear to manifest itself when the MacBook is plugged into the mains also suggests that power throttling on the wireless card (if indeed it does that – anyone?) might have something to do with this as well. Whatever the root cause is, Apple have yet to fix it.

So how did I workaround this problem?

I did two things. I first configured my wireless network to use only WPA encryption using TKIP (not AES). I then deleted the wireless network locations configured on my MacBook through Network and then used the Airport Assistant to detect and connect to my re-configured wireless network. Since then, all has been well!

It’s not ideal as ideally I’d like my wireless network using WPA2 with AES for maximum security as it was before. But until Apple fix this problem then I don’t really have a choice unless I keep my MacBook plugged into the mains! And that really doesn’t make much sense for a laptop…