Running Linux on AppleTV info for marc-us

[mikeh]

Was chatting with marc-us last night during the show (my first time listening to the show live and being in irc).

He mentioned trying to get Linux installed on an appletv. I remembered listening to another podcast where two guys were talking about their work on appletv's and getting xbmc and linux on them (can't remember which podcast it was).

Anyway these were the two projects they had going.

http://groups.google.com/group/atv-bootloader

http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

I believe the latter tries to automate the process of creating a USB stick to allow installation of Linux or XBMC.

Regardless I figured I would mention these sites incase marc checks here, and hasn't seen these sites. Seems like from their discussion areas people are using the tools to install Debian, Ubuntu and other distros.

If you or anybody get Linux working on the AppleTV I would be curious to hear if it can handle 1080i MPEG2. I have heard mixed reports. I am thinking it can do 1080i MPEG2, but chokes on 1080i h.264 encoded stuff.

For my purposes playback of 1080i MPEG2 (as my HDHomeRUN streams from OTA reception) would be all I need. It would make a good low cost MythTV frontend I could use in various rooms in the house, with a major MythTV backend server in the basement.

[Patrick]

Yeah we had Scott Davilla (no relation to me) on last year:
http://tllts.org/dl.php?episode=245

He's a big time AppleTV hacker. He contributes to some of the Myth distros as well as XBMC. He was recently on FLOSS Weekly.

[mikeh]

Floss Weekly must be what I listened to recently that I remembered him talking about appletv and Linux.