XBMC on the Apple TV 2

As previously mentioned, I've been playing with XBMC on the Apple TV 2.

Its worth noting that you need to finish running through the Apple TV setup (selecting language and location etc.) before you can access the device. This needs to be done after updating the firmware.

After installing the latest official build using these instructions I wanted to try the nightly builds. When attempting to update XBMC to a nightly version using the instructions on the same page, dpkg would halt on:

Preparing to replace org.xbmc.xbmc-atv2 10.0-9 ...

It turns out that because my Apple TV is running iOS 4.3, rm -rf which is used to remove the previous version when upgrading, is broken. I therefore needed to manually remove the previous version before updating using the following:

rm -r /Applications/XBMC.frappliance

Skins can be added manually to the Apple TV 2 build of XBMC by SSH'ing to it and downloading them with wget to the addons directory and unzipping:

cd /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/addons/
wget <url of skin.zip>
unzip <skin zip file >
rm <skin zip file >

The skin can then be selected in XBMC (I'm using 'Night' at the moment).

If using an advancedsettings.xml for custom settings, this needs to go here on the Apple TV 2:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/userdata

And the ever useful log file is at:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/xbmc.log