[FAQ] Boxee Beta on ATV

[JimWiley]

ATV Flash Users: You must follow the instructions on the ATV Flash Forums to get Boxee working properly. I am truly sorry that I cannot help you guys, but you have purchased a commercial product that has promised you something in return for your dollar, thus I suggest that you beat down their door first!

Early Access Beta Testers: Please follow this link:

http://forum.boxee.tv/showpost.php?p=95079&postcount=1

Everyone Else:

Basically, you can now install Boxee Beta via the Launcher. If you go to Launcher --> Downloads you will see an entry for Boxee Beta r10xxx (or whatever the latest official version available is). To forestall any confusion I am now going to tell you exactly what this installer gives you (as of 9.30 am GMT 25th Feb 2010):

What does the installer install?

It will check if you have (and install if you don't) Flash 10.0 Final (the early Feb release with the security update), Boxee Beta....

It will also check if you have an advancedsettings.xml and if not (or if you do not have the ATV specific settings) will give you the following settings:

<advancedsettings>
<skiploopfilter>8</skiploopfilter>
<osx_gl_fullscreen>true</osx_gl_fullscreen>
</advancedsettings>

So no more manual editing of this file!

Please note: If you are running the Launcher Installer for the first time and may not have all of the files on your system, then it will take longer to run because, obviously, it has more stuff that it needs to download/install. Subsequent runs should take no longer than a normal Launcher Boxee/XBMC install that we are all used to....

Finally, first time you run Boxee, remove Movies as a local source in Settings --> Media. This is important if you wish Movie and TV Scraping to work properly! Also turn off autogeneration of thumbnails in settings to stop boxee crashing in file browse mode.

What the installer does not install?
The Launcher does not install Flash Beta since it is extremely buggy and can, in some cases, cause lock-ups of the ATV. Install it at your peril! Also Firefox 3.6 is not really necessary for making Boxee work (just helps for backdoor mature content workaround) so this is not installed either. If you are techy and don't mind messing things up, then you can install these kinds of things by following this thread:

http://forum.boxee.tv/showpost.php?p=88578&postcount=1

Remember these are pretty unsupported hacks and you do them off your own back. Caveat Emptor!

Good Luck.... and check back for for updates every once in a while!

Finally: a few Thank You's!

Just wanted to say a few thank you's to the people who have made this possible:

the Launcher Project Owners (S.Diederich, S. Davilla) - Very graciously allowed me access to their project so that I could finesse the Boxee install process. They are XBMC Devs and not part of Boxee - and were therefore under no obligation to do this - so thanks!

The atvusb-creator Project Owners (S. Davilla, Amet1977 & Sam.Nazarko) for making it easy to install software on your ATV. You used to have to crack open your case, hook up your hard drive to a patch cable and connect it to your Computer and then do it all be hand! Now, some people find patchsticking their ATV hard - they don't know how good they've got it!

Keith: For making a pretty rough and ready script into something so smart. Also for stepping up to the plate and hosting necessary files when other sources were pulled. He deserves a medal (or some of your cold, hard, cash...)

Vulkanr: For taking Keith's script and making it Launcher-compatible and committing it to the Launcher Project. Also, for all the other work he's done on all the previous Boxee Installer's - has anyone every thanked him for the Alpha Installs? Probably not! Well, I'm doing it now!

Jim

[vcosta]

Perfect!

Thank you very much for this guide. It worked 10/10

Just something about my previous installation the BOXEE folder was no longer on the /Users/frontrow/ folder but on /Applications instead. Renamed it manually using Cyberduck.

Boxee is faster than ever. Thank you again.

Peace!

[drewje]

Wow, that's great, JimWiley! Mine seems to be up and running fine as well. Per Costa's note, my Boxee.app directory was also in the Applications folder, and I renamed it manually with Fugu.

Works like a charm! Great stuff.

[JimWiley]

Originally Posted by drewje

Wow, that's great, JimWiley! Mine seems to be up and running fine as well. Per Costa's note, my Boxee.app directory was also in the Applications folder, and I renamed it manually with Fugu.

Works like a charm! Great stuff.

Guys thanks for the tip about the Boxee.app directory, it was a typo on my part! Must have been typed before I'd finished my morning coffee! Have edited my post accordingly....

[joecacti]

Thanks for putting this all together, these are the steps I took last night... Two questions:
1) How do I confirm that Flash 10 is installed?
2) Where is the hulu feed? Or do we just use the boxee browser and go to hulu.com?

[duc999s]

This also works on AppleTV 2.4

Just wanted to add that.

Great job!

[hfisher999]

Can you install Nito through Apple TV itself? The last time I did that, my screen went dark, but I heard Nito was updated to work...also, I can do this, but am still an SSH novice, when you copy, you paste into the terminal window...correct?

[roiegat]

nice job!

Looking at the firefoxscript the name is decieving. It actually will get and install wget if you don't have it. You can also use it to install VNC and transmission....which is awesome!

Can't wait to get home and try it out tonight. I moved the ATV to our bedroom so we can use it as a DVR (I have a PC running Boxee Beta that is connected to our main tv in the living room). Can't wait to get it working!

[JimWiley]

Originally Posted by hfisher999

Can you install Nito through Apple TV itself? The last time I did that, my screen went dark, but I heard Nito was updated to work...also, I can do this, but am still an SSH novice, when you copy, you paste into the terminal window...correct?

The easiest way for a novice to copy the files to frontrow is to use something like Cyberduck/Fugu on the Mac or something like WinSCP on windows (don't currently own a windows box, so maybe others are better to advise you there)

That way you can copy over all the files you need at once using the graphical frontend, then open a terminal window and issue

ssh frontrow@appletv.local

to open a session on the ATV. Then, you can easily copy and paste the commands from this thread into the terminal and away you go....

However, if I want to copy files from the terminal window on my imac, I normally issue something like:

scp filename frontrow@appletv.local:~/

which would copy the file named 'filename' from the current directory to the frontrow directory on the ATV.


For example:

imacg5:Desktop jim$ scp ./FirefoxInstallScript.sh frontrow@appletv.local:~/
Welcome to the AppleTV (via atv-usbcreator)
frontrow@appletv.local's password: 
FirefoxInstallScript.zip                      100% 2023     2.0KB/s   00:00    
imacg5:Desktop jim$

Which copies the script from my desktop (the directory I was in) to the frontrow directory on my ATV and then returns me back to my command prompt at my mac. This is my preferred method of copying, because it's flexible and fast and you can whack it in scripts. But it's not necessary and I thought it would complicate the instructions needlessly.

For example: if you set up shared keys and watched folders on your mac, you can write a script that copies any thing you drop in a certain folder directly to frontrow on the ATV. I used to have something similar set up for torrent and nzb files until I hosed my ATV (don't ask!) and had to restore from scratch.

[JimWiley]

Originally Posted by roiegat

nice job!

Looking at the firefoxscript the name is decieving. It actually will get and install wget if you don't have it. You can also use it to install VNC and transmission....which is awesome!

Can't wait to get home and try it out tonight. I moved the ATV to our bedroom so we can use it as a DVR (I have a PC running Boxee Beta that is connected to our main tv in the living room). Can't wait to get it working!

It won't install wget, the link is out of date and hdid downloads dmg's and mounts them and I couldn't find another url pointing to a dmg'ed wget. So If you follow the instructions on how to get it in a zipped version, then the script will ignore that step and carry on with the rest of the install.

As for Firefox, the script originally grabbed 3.0.4 which runs like a dog. I have altered the script to download Firefox 2 which runs very acceptably from the NitoTV menu.

As for VNC - install the native apple version (installed by NitoTV smart installer - think it might require a 1.0 recovery.dmg as well as 10.4.9.dmg) rather than the one I commented out in the script, because there's something hinky about keypresses with the script version. I tends to get struck repeating a single keystroke about 15-20 times occassionally - it drove me mad in the end and I went back to using the native version.

As for transmission - I can't speak for this install. It is better to run the transmission-daemon binary rather than the full app and interact with it via built-in web server. You can find instructions on AwkwardTV.