OpenELEC announces Apple iTV support
We are proud to announce very early support for the Apple iTV.
Over the Easter weekend we had some time to complete some research and development into Apple’s upcoming TV solution. With the help of leaked specifications and documents which described important, (for us), internal details about the hardware and its bootprocess, progress was made porting OpenELEC onto this device.
From previous work, we already have experience in supporting the ATV-1 device, like Apple remote support, which helped considereably.. We also know the new Apple iTV will include USB ports - mainly intended to connect a Harddisk to store recordings but also, (important to us), used as a service USB port. With this port it is possible - together with a key combo on the remote to force the iTV to boot a prepared EFI kernel image directly from USB stick.
Image taken from http://www.apfelnews.eu/2012/12/23/apfelnews-wochenruckblick-5/
Nothing very special hardware wise from Apple’s side (except round corners):
“They still put their pants on one leg at a time” or like we say in german: “They also cook only with water”.
Some work, that was recently pushed into the Linux kernel helps alot. This commit adds support to boot a kernel directly via EFI and because OpenELEC already supports the latest and greatest kernels it was rather easy.
For the remaining parts we use already known working things like XBMC’s iOS and ARM support.
I am interested, how i can get a image?
We actually cant provide prebuilt images, yet. The work is nearly done, but some “fine tuning” is still required. If you are intrested to help us with development you can checkout our git sources and build yourself with the following commands:
git clone git://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv.git openelec-itv
cd openelec-itv
PROJECT=iTV make release
Do we need to jailbreak Apple’s iTV?
No! Jailbreaking is only for small devices like Phones, Settop boxes and tablets. Systems with included screens bigger than 12” dont need to be jail broken. As described above it will work with EFI enabled kernels.
What are the plans?
Like you already know we are still trying to bring OpenELEC/XBMC to consumer devices to distribute on of the greatest and also free Opensource Mediacenter solutions to everyone. We think together with Emulator support, Valves linux support for Steam included in OpenELEC and XBMCs Mediacenter solution we can provide an OS within the near future, that is designed and optimized for your living room to replace as many devices as possible. OpenELEC will also help you with a resource friendly and clean setup.
You dont need to buy a Playstation, Wii, Xbox, DVD/BD Player, Settop box, HTPC etc...
All you need is OpenELEC!
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