Does anyone have one of these, and are they any good
Plenty of on line TV/Video’s all free and legal

Apple Jail broken TV

I’ve got two, both which I bought new from Apple and jail broke myself.

At the time they were £100 each and jail breaking is only a 10 minute job. I guess the 2nd gen ones are carrying a premium now because you cant jailbreak the current (3rd gen) ones. They are great as a silent, easy to use, set top.

Main thing to bear in mind with these Apple Tvs is they have no storage. Your content must be served from elsewhere, either the Internet or somewhere else on your network. I have a Mac Mini running Plex media centre that serves up the content to the Plex app running on the ATVs. All the content is actually stored on my NAS. Out of the box, non jail broken, your expected to have a similar setup using iTunes as the server and content library.

The ‘freeness’ is slightly over stated by that EBay ad. Very little of the ‘free’ content mentioned is legal if such things bother you.

AppleTV’s are great if you want to rent/buy films or tv series from iTunes but apart from that not a lot else apart from Airplaying from your mac, iPad or iPhone.

As for Jailbreaking its a piece of cake, download SeasonPass and it does everything. Obviously jailbreaks are only available for certain hardware on particular software versions, so bare that in mind if you buy.

I have my AppleTV2 jailbroken running XBMC which streams media from my NAS. Works Great…

Hi guys
For my daughter she wants E entertainment is the available to down load onto these units
Thank you both for your replies

There were rumours of an ATV3 jailbreak recently but it turned out to be false. Unlikely to be forthcoming anytime soon either. ATV2s are commanding a fair premium for this reason

If you fancy achieving the same thing for £35ish I’ve just bought a Raspberry Pi and installed Openelec. It plays pretty much anything (video/music/photo) from a nas, wirelessly. Awesome bit of kit!

There are iplayer,YouTube etc plugins for it too

Personally I think the ATV is a bit overpriced considering its competition now

Actually the AppleTV 2 does have onboard storage it’s just not common knowledge! It’s only about 7gb if I remember correctly but I’ve got about 8 films on ours right now.
Once jailbroken you can install xbmc which will play either streamed or stored content.
To get content on there you connect via sftp with a username of root and password of alpine.
Works great.

Thank you all for your input of information
One thing is can you get SKY programs on the Apple unit
Thanks RicB but i have a Mac Book Pro to use too.

Sharkbait what is an sftp ?

i’m waiting for a next gen rasberry pi type thing, just a bit more powerfull to come out so i can install linux and xbmc and a few other bits etc, openelec looks good though for least hassle
you can install openelec on some appletv but ras pi cheaper..

dobo
Yep was very interested in that but wanted to stream using ITunes on my Mac
I am surprised not many others are using or thinking of this format

grantway, i can understand you wanting to do that if you have a mac and like apple stuff and itunes, if you didnt want to use itunes then there are alternative hardware and software out there.
i think the future of this kind of thing is very bright and can be very dangerous for apple.
imagine an opensource platform on cheap hardware that always you to subscribe to say sky or lovefilm etc or any service but of course not itunes, sooner or later it will all be built in to tvs anyway and is getting that way allready

AppleTV’s are great if you want to rent/buy films or tv series from iTunes but apart from that not a lot else apart from Airplaying from your mac, iPad or iPhone.

I use Canadian Netflix on my ATV3 and there’s loads of good stuff on there. I also use StreamToMe to AirPlay content from my iMac with big external HD upstairs without converting/importing into iTunes etc, which works great. RedBull TV streamed to the telly is good, and there’s some great stuff on Vimeo and YouTube that’s nice to watch on a bigger screen sat on your sofa.

I would say if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad it’s maybe not worth getting ATV. I’ve never rented a film from iTunes as it seems a bit much – only ever bought the odd bike video.

Hi Grum
yep I have an IPhone too
And yes I feel that online renting and purchasing of films are ridicules
if not 50% over priced considering its just an down load as to speak.

Sftp = secure FTP (file transfer protocol). Download a free FTP app and IOU use to to connect to the ATV and send files to it.

Thanks sharkbait for the info

My Pi has AirPlay- streams from iPhone, MacBook and iPad just as well as my airport express did. Except I can now stream video as well as music

Plus the openelec software has more config options re video resolution and audio quality than the AE