Hi, I'm new to the whs world. I recently purchased a mediasmart unit with the intention of installing itunes on it to stream to my appletv.

I did my research on this site and others about how to install itunes 9. I did the hacks and got it installed and it worked but there were some issues. When the server started up and when itunes was launched there were some error messages. These were ignorable but bothered me that they were there.

The other issue which was the bigger issue is that sometimes the appletv and itunes wouldn't see eachother requiring a reboot of the server.

In the past i had hacked my appletv to use boxee but found that boxee ran too slow and wasn't worth it and got rid of it by letting my appletv update to the lastest firmware (which gets rid of your hacks).

I had forgot about the fact that xbmc (xbox media center) is installed when you hack the appletv (at least by the method that i had used).

Since hacking the appletv was very easy i decided to revisit it. I read a lot of posts on the xbmc forums and found that the technique to had the appletv was different now that is had a new 3.0.1 firmware but was still easy.

I did the appletv hack and found that using xbmc to stream videos, music and movies from my mediasmart unit was easy and slick.

During this process my original mediasmart unit developed a noisy fan so i rma'd it and got a new unit. On this new unit i loaded in my media but not itunes.

Now i just turn on my appletv and go to the xbmc and play my media. It's a better solution then installing itunes 9 on my mediasmart.

So just a quick overview of hacking the appletv:

step 1: make a usb thumbdrive patchstick. There is an automated program that does this easly. Use the patchstick to enable ssh.
step 2: ssh into the appltv and download the program launcher, then download the latest xbmc.

Detailed instructions can be found on the xbmc forums.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Hi! Great post! If I were to do as you said with my apple tv, would I still be able to see DRM contents that I bought from Itunes? I would like to put all the videos that I bought from itunes into the HP mediasmart server and then stream it to the apple tv. Do you know if your way would work to do this?
Thanks

Hi, I believe if you just put your files on the server and use the hack to install xbmc the drm media will not play through xbmc. But if you use the server as an itunes server it will work for drm files. You would just have to have itunes on one of your other computers on all the time and point it to the files on the server. Then the appletv would just see the files on the server through itunes running on your other computer and will be able to stream that media.

Hope that helps.

Hi! Thanks for the fast reply! It certainly answers my question. The reason why I'm interested to have a server is precisely to share files without going through the computer. I know that in the HP mediasmart server there is a function to stream music to itunes, do you know if that function works to stream video with itunes directly, without going through a third device?

Thanks

You can't stream directly to appletv from the server unless you hack xbmc onto the appletv. Without xbmc you would have to install iTunes on the server itself which I now believe is not the way to go. Or you have to go through iTunes on another computer.

For drm media you would have to stream from server to another computer and then to appletv (hacked or not).

For non-drm media you can stream from server to hacked appletv.

Xbmc on the appletv works very well for me.

If you do hack the appletv I recommend updating the firmware on the appletv to the latest, hack it, then make sure automatic updates on the appletv are turned off. Otherwise you will have to rehack after an update and sometimes there is not a hack for new firmware right away.

Question about the XBMC hack on AppleTV - does this affect what the AppleTV plays? All of my encodes contain two audio streams - an AAC mixdown for my other devices and an AC3 Passthrough for use on the Apple TV to give me that glorious surround sound. Will the XMBC hack effectively break the abilty to play back the AC3 5.1 passthrough? I haven't been able to find an answer which has stopped me from installing XBMC on the AppleTV.

Thanks!

I don't know the answer to that. But it's a pretty easy hack to try out.