einige leute haben versucht mich anzurufen.. ich bin im urlaub und die roamingkosten sind enorm. bitte per email oder fb.. gruss, sebastian
In my last post i spoke about moving my home server / office workstation to a mac mini. That went very well, i was positively suprised by the ease of installing and configuring the system. My media (lots of music, movies and tv shows) currently lives on an external 2 TB drive and is served via SMB to the LAN.
In the living room there is a flatscreen LCD TV, a Beamer and my almost ancient Onkyo Stereo. This used to be fed by some old PC capable of doing 1080p from MKVs, but i have replaced it with an AppleTV2. The little box rung up € 104.- on Amazon and was delivered to my doorstep in combination with an automatic HDMI-Splitter (works very well, switches between TV and Beamer only by turning one of the devices on, no buttons to press, yay!) and an additional A/D converter to connect the optical sound output from the aTV2 to the Onkyo Stereo (no digital input, it’s from like the 1980s). Hooked everything up and it connected to my iTunes library being served from the mac mini server in the office via cat 5 cable without hasstle. But there is one serious shortcomming with respect to iTunes (and apple as a whole): they really try hard with the vendor lock-in and give no options when it comes to video files not supplied in the H.264 Format bundled in an .mp4 container… most of the media off “TEH INTERNETZ” is, unfortunately, not in this format…
Enter Jailbreaking and XBMC… so, reading up on this before i made the purchase things sounded absolutely doable. Get handy on a micro-USB cable, boot tethered and use seasonpass / nitoTV to get the device freed of apples chains. I used the stock iOS version of 4.2.2 (i think its called 4.1 on aTV2) and it worked like a charm, first time round (but please, do the research before you get started). Next up you move over to the excellent XBMC Forums and look for hints to get it installed on a jailbroken aTV2 (it was something along the lines of a simple “apt-get update && apt-get install xbmc”, so nothing challenging there). Literally 3 minutes later i was back downstairs with an untethered jailbroken aTV2 which semlessly plays all the videos i can throw at it via XBMC. All controlled via the little apple remote (or via iphone, or webinterface…). This means there is no more meddling around with “computers” in the livingroom, this makes for a high WAF. And this in turn makes me happy… 
So, we now have the basic functionality of a media center PC going without the clutter and complexity of such a setup. At the touch of a few buttons you can:
But there was more… XBMC has an extensive list of “Plug-Ins” availible to use (installation is idiot-proof because it’s all done via the remote): stuff like access to the mediathek for streaming of german public TV on-demand, acess to live Al-Jazeera TV, all the CCC videos, just to name a few. But there is one more plug-in, a special one, one that changes the way you think about getting media of the net: icefilms.
Remember the good old days? First it was all about BBS, then we had private FTP hosts (this is comming back, somewhat), the Napster dropped and filesharing went public. After a while Napster went “for-profit” and everyone moved to alternate P2P Networks like eDonkey with the next big thing being torrents. Currently torrents on public trackers are a problem due to privacy concerns (hi Alex… how’s the courtroom action going?)… so it’s back to filehosting and streams… With the german authorities killing off kino.to (which was better than nothing, but was a real bastard about the UI and User-Experience) there had to be something new. i found it in icefilms with the excellent icefilms XBMC-Plugin.
Stream it to me, baby!
so, from the couch via a little remote, i can now access icefilms, search the database and stream a LOT of stuff right to my livingroom… without a computer, with a high WAF… its great… i am not giving the links, do your own legwork, giyf.
Da mein alter “zuhause Server” schändlicherweise unter Windows lief (und der Maximalausbau mit Ram bei 2GB für heutige Verhältnisse zu klein ist) habe ich den late-2009 mac-mini (2,26GHz Core2Duo und 8 GB Ram) aus dem Wohnzimmer ins Büro gestellt und den leidigen Weg der Migration begonnen. Da also mein Zuspieler für Fernseher, Beamer und Stereoanlage nicht mehr vorhanden war musste ich diesen auch noch ersetzen. Dazu aber später, in einem anderen Post, mehr. sage hier nur soviel: appletv2, jailbreak und xbmc…
Dienste zur Migration
