Apple TV hacking update: PhoneView, ping, VNC support

Veni vidi hacki. Just picked up an Apple TV this afternoon at the Cherry Creek Apple Store (shout out to the guys there!) and while I haven't had a long time to play around with it -- hence the brevity of this post -- I have had a few moments of hands-on testing to share with you. Here are the basic highlights.
Apple TV works with Ecamm's PhoneView right out of the box. Simply connect your Apple TV to your Mac using the handy USB cable, power it up and launch PhoneView. You'll be able to access mobile user AFC service areas of your Apple TV disk, just as you can with unjailbroken iPhones, iPods, and iPads. That means file transfer capabilities for basic iTunes items like music.

For whatever reason, I have as-yet been unable to see my Apple TV in iTunes. (Update: You can if you accidentally slip into recovery mode. Ooops. I ended up having to restore -- which gives you an error but then the unit connects fine to TVs.) I've tried connecting with power, sans power, etc. No luck. It could be because I have, as yet, not hooked the unit up to a TV. That's because my old HDMI cable doesn't fit the unit and I have to go out and buy a new one. (Update: It's HDMI to DVI, so I need HDMI to HDMI or to buy an audio adapter. Right now, I have no audio.) Until then, the Apple TV won't be able to display on an actual TV. (Update: Now it does, sans sound, I'm afraid.) More to follow on that.

Update: I have not had any problems logging into my Apple account and accessing home sharing.

You can register your Apple TV device in Xcode (it shows up immediately) to the iOS developer portal but you cannot perform any actual development -- yet. Xcode complains that Apple TV does not "support development". Bummer that.

I had no problem pinging my unit after plugging in an Ethernet cable. So that's cool.

% ping AppleTV.local PING appletv.local.sadunnet (XX.143.50): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from XX.143.50: icmp_seq=0 ttl=114 time=57.706 ms 64 bytes from XX.143.50: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=56.001 ms 64 bytes from XX.143.50: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=56.854 ms ^C --- appletv.local.sadunnet ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 56.001/56.854/57.706/0.696 ms %

And, of course, I did try connecting -- and failed.

% ssh root@AppleTV.local ssh: connect to host AppleTV.local port 22: Connection refusedBummer that. VNC didn't work either.

TinyUmbrella happily saved my SHSH blobs, but I haven't been able to go further yet. I will post more later on -- stay tuned.

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Veni vidi hacki. Just picked up an Apple TV this afternoon at the Cherry Creek Apple Store (shout out to the guys there!) and while I...

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oz_paulb

@SIP: I was saying that the headline itself was misleading. Once you get into the article, you can see the details - but attention-grabbing headlines that imply something works is a bad idea, IMO.

How about this for a headline? : "Apple TV Hacking update: bluetooth keyboard, USB cameras, FaceTime support". That would really make me (and others) believe that some if this actually worked.

I really don't care (from a 'headline' standpoint) if someone tried it/it failed. It's useful to have a record of this random experimentation, but I don't think it warrants an article.

IF you want to make such an article, the headline should be something like "Apple TV Hacking update: NO Bluetooth or USB camera support; FaceTime doesn't exist".

See how that conveys real information, without misleading??

My two cents.

October 01 2010 at 12:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

collegereg

Someone said you can stream multiple iTunes users to the AppleTv, but that's not working for me at all. I cannot even stream 1! I have Home Sharing on, I have authorized the computer, and I even left iTunes open (out of desperation), but I only get a message on the AppleTv to make sure HomeSharing is on. WiFi, Netflix, MobileMe, and everything else works - except the sharing.

October 01 2010 at 11:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

SIP

What the headline "Apple TV hacking update: PhoneView, ping, VNC support" says to me is that the author had hacked their ï£¿TV and had attempted to use it with PhoneView (worked); ping (acknowledged that network connection working) which led to attempting a VNC session (did not work, damn!).

The post also mentions that (for what it's worth**) "TinyUmbrella happily saved my SHSH blobs" --basically, if ï£¿ issues an update to the ï£¿TV blocking JB blah blah, Erica should/will be able to roll-back the firmware on her device.

**That ability on an iPhone is worth ten times the iPhone's weight in gold. I've kept my iPhone's Modem Firmware on 04.26.08 and with my SHSHs on Cydia, I can roll-back to iPhoneOS 3 if I need/want to.

October 01 2010 at 10:58 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

SIP

I love Erica's post -- at least she's a real programmer who knows what she is talking about.

Recently had cause to email her about an app and her responses were quick and informative (Hey erica, don't let the bastard's get you down).

October 01 2010 at 10:47 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Steve516

I found some great deals on amazon for belkin hdmi and toslink cables...

October 01 2010 at 9:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brett

Funny, Erica's posts are typically the most interesting to me.

To each his own; though rudeness isn't really called for.

October 01 2010 at 9:14 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

urth

fun, what a relief and renewal of interest in TUAW to read some neat info about someone doing something new, what have you done new lately?
thanks- keep poking and pinging, ...and shattering.http://is.gd/fDAbc

October 01 2010 at 2:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Heckler

So, Erica Sadun, you (previously) NDA violating person, you . . . you've mislead me again with your headline indicating that AppleTV has VNC support. I clicked in to the article hoping to find some juicy gem. Instead I found that you typed in "vnc://AppleTV.local" and it failed.

Stop press pandering.

October 01 2010 at 1:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mystic

I completely agree! TUAW you need to add an option to filter authors if you're going to continue like this.

September 30 2010 at 11:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

oz_paulb

>> "Apple TV hacking update: PhoneView, ping, VNC support"

What a *terrible* headline for this NON-article!

The headline makes you believe that VNC works, yet the article says exactly the opposite.

(as others have pointed out, "ping" working is sort of a no-brainer - although it may have been the case that AppleTV blocked ICMP/ping packets, it really wouldn't matter one way or the other)

The only real 'info' here is that "PhoneView" seems to work.

At this point, people are keeping their eyes open for *news* about things that *do* work on the AppleTV. Listing stuff that it can NOT do in the title (without saying so in the title) is very misleading, IMO.

Lame.

September 30 2010 at 10:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply