Schmaltz on wry

Interested in Apple, Android, technology, or pure geekdom? Other posts on this blog you might like:

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Have you received an Apple TV for Christmas, and discovered that without XBMC, it’s nothing more than a simple shopping mall - and in Australia, that all stores in the mall are marked “for lease”? Then you’ve come to the right place - read on to find out how to install XBox Media Center on your Apple TV, and finally enjoy your media collection in style.

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Written October 5th, 2011. Plenty may have changed since then. Please add your questions and comments using the comment form below, and I’ll reply with any more advice I’ve picked up since October 2011.

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I recently had my first child. In the week before he arrived, I spent time “nesting” at home. Usually for expectant parents this means finishing off the nursery, hacking the hedges, or maniacally tidying the under-stairs cupboard. As a self-proclaimed proud geek, for me nesting entailed finishing off the wireless network, hacking the Apple TV, and maniacally tidying my media collection.

It wasn’t that hard, but it was challenging and fun to do. In the interest of helping my fellow geeks, here’s my guide to installing XBMC (X Box Media Center) on an Apple TV (generation 2), and streaming content from a Synology NAS (DS211j+).

The first 2 steps link to great guides to show you how to get started. However, once XBMC is installed, there’s plenty of configuration to complete. Those are what the next 7 steps are for! Plus a few tips I’ve learnt along the way.

1. Connect your Apple TV to your wireless network

2. Install XBMC on your Apple TV

The Apple TV’s default root login account is username:root, password:alpine

3. Organise your movie and TV content on your NAS (to allow for metadata to be scraped for each file from repositories such as IMDB)

Each movie should sit within its own directory. Eg: \Movies\Movietitle\Moviefile.avi.
TV shows should be organised like this: \TV\TVtitle\Season n\TV.Show.Title SnnEnn.avi. You can also have, after SnnEnn, a space and then the episode title, if you’d like (e.g. “Game.Of.Thrones S01E01 Pilot.avi”). Instead of spaces, you can also use hyphens

4. Download the metadata for your media content onto the NAS (as about 10% of downloaded metadata is incorrect, it’s easier to edit it through this software with your computer keyboard, than it is to do so through the Apple TV remote!)

In Windows, install Ember Media Manager
Point it towards your media collection on your NAS (\Edit\Settings\Movies\Files and Sources\ and \Edit\Settings\TV Shows\Files and Sources\) and then Update Library
Scrape Media (use “Ask - Require input if no exact match” so that IMDB doesn’t provide an incorrect movie match)
Ember will then create nfo and image files that will make your XBMC really pretty

5. Share your media content from your NAS

Log in to your NAS as administrator, and go to Control Panel
In File Sharing and Privileges, Enable Windows File Service
Or, if your NAS doesn’t have this option (it’s a menu item in Synology only, obviously), find the SMB/Windows File Service option, and enable

6. Add your shared NAS content repositories as sources in XBMC

Go to Videos\Files\Add Videos\Browse
Choose Windows network (SMB) (you could use uPnP, but then you’d miss out on all the metadata scraping that makes XBMC so powerful)
Navigate to and choose the directory your video content is in (repeat these steps for each directory you have video content in)
When prompted, now and whenever you add a file to your library, use local metadata, not Internet (otherwise all that diligent Ember scraping is for naught!)

7. Stop XBMC spontaneously restarting as Apple tries to execute its auto update software (this is a common problem experienced by XBMC users, and this is the only solution I’ve found which works - plus it goes right to the source of the problem, rather than relying on plugins or apps). In Putty, backup and then edit your hosts file:

cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak
echo “127.0.0.1 appldnld.apple.com” » /etc/hosts
echo “127.0.0.1 mesu.apple.com” » /etc/hosts
echo “127.0.0.1 appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net” » /etc/hosts

That’s it! You are now up and running with XBMC on your Apple TV 2! As you start using XBMC, you’ll find two challenges:

Using the Apple TV remote to get around XBMC
Adding new files to XBMC

Here’s what I wish I had known in advance, rather than having to find out by trial and error:

Remote:

Holding down the menu button for 2 seconds is like a right click menu - except on the main menu/front page of your skin, where it will restart Apple TV
Holding down the centre silver button for 2 seconds during playback gives you all your pause/fastforward/rewind/etc controls.

Adding files:

Save your correctly named files into the correct location on your NAS
In Ember, Update Library
In XBMC, Update Library (remember, use Local Content not Internet when prompted)
If it doesn’t show you your new files, it’s usually because you haven’t named them correctly - and Ember will also not have scraped and titled them correctly. Tidy and re-update until your files are displayed correctly
(If you’re using the Confluence skin in XBMC, navigate to the directory you’ve placed the new file/s into, and using the Menu button, choose “Update content”. If you’re using the Back Row skin, I haven’t found the equivalent command - instead, you have to update the entire library, which can take 5 minutes if you have around 2TB of content. I have gone back to using Confluence simply because updating the library is so much quicker and easier.)

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