Well, the wonderful thing about big screen TV is being able to see all of your content on that screen. We do that via digital cable boxes, satellite receivers. Well, it’s nice to get some of the content off of your computers. Wow, we’ve got all of our music, our own home videos, DVDs that we’ve ripped, even our photo collection.
Well, today we’re going to have to look at the Apple TV and taking that to the next level. If you haven’t see the Apple TV before, this is basically a little media center box that allows you to hook up your computer wirelessly to iTunes and share all of that content on your big screen TV. It’s almost like a little mini computer inside. It’s got to build in hard drive and also a wireless network connection as well.
But the one downside about the Apple TV is that you’re really locked in to iTunes. What we want to show you today is how to kind of unlock or upgrade your Apple TV so that you can play all sorts of different types of media and even have access to different types of media center interfaces plus we’ll also show you how to unlock the USB connection on the back, so you can even plug in external hard drive, something that you can’t do right now. It’s a program called ATV Flash and you can get this kind of upgrade your hack on the internet for free. But what I like about ATV Flash is that it actually combines everything for you. So it really makes it simple to upgrade and all you’ll need is basically compatible USB thumb drive. You can download the program on here and we’ll be good to go.
We want to go to the ATV Flash website at atvflash.com and this is where you download the software. This particular one cost $50.00 to start. You simply select which version you want the Mac or PC, make your payment and I’ve already downloaded this. I’m going to put the flash driver into the computer and just launch the installer. In the meantime, we also want to setup a Boxee the account and this is really cool. It allows us to actually share all of our media files that are on our computers and our network. And this is pretty easy process. You simply go to boxee.tv and hit the SIGN UP button here.
So now, I’m setup for Boxee. It looks like the flash drive is ready as well and what we’re going to do is go back to the Apple TV and get everything rolling. What you’re going to have to do is basically take the box and unplug the power from it. Once we’ve done that on the back here, we simply take the USB thumb drive and we stick it in to the USB slot. There’s only one so you can’t really messed it up. So plug it back in. The nice thing is you don’t have to worry about mocking up your Apple TV. If you don’t like the programs that installed, if you have ever any issues which you won’t, you can always reset the Apple TV box back to the factory settings.
And so at the end here, you can see at the bottom the ATV Flash software has been successfully installed. You may now remove the flash drive and restart your Apple TV. So what we do is we go back down to the Apple TV and again, pretty simply. We unplug the power and we take the USB flash drive out as well. And from there, we just basically plug the power in again and wait for to boot up. We can install flip for Mac, WMV, flash. You can even install the mobile air mouse driver. If I wanted too, I can now use that USB port on the back. I could do that before with the original Apple TV box. And look at this, I can also install things like Google Earth and this is kind of a cool thing down here, hot spot shield. A lot of these internet channels which we’ll get to in a moment are actually blocked depending on what country they’re in. If you’re trying to access stuff on the BBC or down in the United States for example, they actually blocked your IP address. They know you’re coming in from Canada. Well, this hot spot shield will actually, when installed, block that so they don’t know so you can use some of that stuff. Also here, we’re going to go up to the XPMC Boxee menu. And what I want to start doing here is downloading things.
So we’ve installed Boxee but before we go in to it and actually start configuring it, I need to install a few other things. What we’re going to the Nido TV interface. What we want to do is install some of the extras that it has. The Apple TV Box straight from Apple will only play iTunes based content or MP4s. By installing all these extra code X, we can then play pretty well any time of video file that you can imagine right now, everything from DivX to MKV files. Installing this, you’ll allow us to watch all of it on our big screen TV which is kind of a nice feature.
Next, we want to go down to the smart installer. This actually installs some additional drivers on to the box itself including the ability to actually use that USB port for additional things like external hard drives, keyboards and mouse.
So Boxee is the interface we’re going to use for all of our media that’s coming off for our network or computers. Right now what we need to do is add a new profile and remember we said that already up on the Boxee website, so simply just click on it and we will type in the username and profile and get that setup.
So this is the welcome screen we get when we first log in to Boxee. Up top here, there’s a recommendations from our people that we’re following, friends activity and that’s kind of the cool things. This is kind of the social networking interface as well. What you want to do is get your friends all hook up with Boxee and they don’t have to have an Apple TV. They can actually watch it on windows machine, Apple or even Linux as well. And the cool thing is you can actually kind of see what they’re watching and they’re recommending and that help you choose new types of TV shows and movies.
So what we need to do is tell Boxee where all our stuff is. So we’re going to up to applications and this is kind of the cool part about Boxee. Not only can you have an access all your own media content, you can actually go up on the internet and access all of the internet video and music that’s out there and this is a cool feature. I think probably one of the powerful aspects of it.
Well, it takes a little while for the menu to actually populate itself and what it’s doing is basically checking all those video files whether they’re movies or TV shows, going out to the internet and finding all the information for them and also the cover art as well. I’m going to show you what I mean here. We’ve given it a bit of time. So for example in movies, what I’ve done is I’ve actually ripped all of my DVD collection onto my media server so that I don’t have to keep plopping in DVDs.
I can check out the Apple trailer, get a little preview of the movie before I even watch it to make sure that I do want to watch it and I can go down and read more as well. And this is kind of the nice thing about Boxee is that it goes and gets all these informations for you. I can go in and checkout things like my mad man things that I’ve downloaded so it breaks it down to seasons. And nice thing too is that it even breaks it down by episode and also gives you descriptions as well.
So there you have it. We’re actually able to stream all of our digital media content enter our internet video files directly to our Apple TV box which is a great feature. We can see it all on the big screen TV the way it was meant to be. Again, I’ve really kind of simplify this whole process. You’ll want to checkout the documentation for both Boxee and the ATV Flash. And remember, if you want to do this all free, you can download these different components. But what I do like about the ATV Flash, it makes it really simple whenever there’s any upgrades to any of the software, it does it all automatically for you. You can checkout their website. You can also checkout Apples website for their Apple TV box here but it’s a great way to access all your digital media in one simple place.
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