Whats this XBMC for Mac running on the AppleTV?

Whats this XBMC for Mac running on the AppleTV?

 

Team XBMC

September 30, 20081 min read

Yes sir, that’s correct. XBMC for Mac runs on the AppleTV and get this, it’s under the native AppleTV OS that you can launch right from FrontRow. Pretty cool. I do have give great thanks to Stephan Diederich for his absolutely brilliant work on the AppleTV plugin XBMC Launcher with install/update capabilities.

XBMC Launcher was one part of the puzzle, the other part was something that I’ve been working on and off for several months and that part was ATVUSB-Creator. This utility lets one easily create a USB flash drive of the special flavor that the AppleTV requires for USB booting. Couple that with ATV-Bootloader ( another creation of mine) and presto, a python/QT4 application that runs under OSX/Linux/Windows (only OSX right now) which is a GUI driven AppleTV patchstick creator. And 100 percent legal too.

The third part was enabling XBMC for Mac to run on OSX 10.4 as well as 10.5. This turned out to be pretty simple too because I am also an Apple Select Developer who has used XCode since the beginning of time. and Most of the time was spent getting the internal/external libs building correctly and documenting the build process.

So now you can enjoy XBMC for Mac on all three Apple flavors, 10.5, 10.4 and the AppleTV.

Installing XBMC for Mac is an easy three step operation;

  1. Use ATVUSB-Creator to create a USB flash drive (remember to select XBMC for Mac)

  2. Boot the AppleTV using this USB flash drive and it will automatically install the selected items

  3. ReBoot the AppleTV and now there is an XBMC menu entry, select update and pick beta1 and let it install.

Select XBMC from the right hand menu, it will launch XBMC for Mac and enjoy.