Tired of re-encoding all your movies and manage them with iTunes, just so you can enjoy them with your new AppleTV? We have a solution for you, and it’s called Plex. This tutorial is more for the intermediate user, comfortable with the command-line, but we tried to explained it and illustrate it with screenshots, so it will go as smooth as possible…
NOTE: if everything goes well, you will be able to use your AppleTV remote and the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad remote app to ‘pause’ and ‘fast forward’ any movie your are watching.
The Software so far is nothing more than a proof of concept, which isn’t tested at all. However there are some known issues:
1 “Local Servers” screen does only update when you press the up or down button on your remote
2 Larger Sections timeout while they are loaded and do never show up
3 Only Video playback is working (no music files, no images, no App-Management)
The following explains how you can install (and later on update) the plugin on your (Jailbroken) ATV. Use the software at your own risk and don’t blame anyone except yourself if your ATV blows up in the process. Consider this the last warning!!!
Prepare the Media Server
Before you install the actual plugin you need to prepare the Plex Media Server. This assumes you have already installed Plex on your Computer. If not go to http://www.plexapp.com/ and get it installed. (It needs some tweaks before it would talk to the ATV). Since those changes are considered ‘beta’, you need to tell your Plex Media Server to download beta plug-ins, by entering the following URL in a Safari (I tried with Chrome and it didn’t work) running on the same machine as the media server:
http://localhost:32400/system/:/prefs/set?AS_BETA=1
After that start Plex and check for updates in the PlexOnline section.
Install the Plugin
First off: you need a jailbroken Apple TV. A nice little instruction can be found on FSM.. I suggest using a laptop or desktop for your SSH session so you can just copy and paste these comands.
1 Start your ATV and log in to your ATV using ssh root@your.atv.ip .
It will ask you for your password, which (if you did not change the default) is alpine. (I strongly suggest you change the password using the passwd command!!!)
2 In that ssh session, you need to add new cydia sources using
echo “deb http://apt.awkwardtv.org ./” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/awkwardtv.list
3 echo “deb http://www.ambertation.de ./downloads/PLEX/” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plex.list
4 Now update your cydia database using
apt-get update
5 Install the plugins (and its dependencies like beigelist by DHowett) with
apt-get install plex-client-plugin
6 Respring your AppleTV by typing ‘killall Lowtide’, and hope that it will come back to life.
If your Apple TV doesn’t reboot, hold down the down and menu button until the light starts blinking and release. It will then re-boot. If the UI does not come up again, you probably have to restore your ATV!
That is it. You should see the PLEX menu item now.
Updating the Plugin
Once in a while the dev might release an updated version for the plugin, so once in a while you might want to check for updates and install them. Here is how that will work:
1 Start your ATV and log in to your ATV using ssh
ssh root@your.appletv.ip
2 In that ssh session enter
apt-get update
3 apt-get upgrade
That’s it. Have fun…