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ExcludeTop7 How-Tos iOS & Mac how-tos

How to stream to XBMC on an Apple TV 2 from a Lion Mac using Playback

Note: before we start, if you’re not already using XBMC to stream to your AppleTV, give my article about Firecore’s ATV Flash a read first – it’s a little easier to set up than XBMC and may solve all your problems.

I’ve been using a jailbreaked (is that a word? should it be jailbroken?) AppleTV 2 and XBMC to stream media from my Snow Leopard Mac for about a year now. It’s awesome.

And then Lion came along and broke it.

Like many people, I was using the SMB method to get media to the XBMC installation, but Lion apparently uses a new, Apple-made variant of the SMB protocols which the XBMC and/or the ATV2 doesn’t like. Now, there are ways around this by switching to NFS for example but I have had no end of hassle getting NFS to work properly despite a lot of input from friendly folks like memphiz at the XBMC for iOS forums. I presume I’m doing something wrong, but it’s beyond the scope of my technophilia right now and in the meantime I need a way to watch my media.

Enter Playback by Yazsoft. It streams all your stuff to a variety of devices, such as PS3, XBOX 360, even XBMC and Plex installations, through UPnP. There’s other software that does similar things, such as Connect360 and Rivet, but Rivet doesn’t work on Lion and besides, it just got end-of-life’d (thanks for nothing, guys!) while Connect360 is kinda ugly on your 360 as it doesn’t respect your folder structure and dumps the entire contents of every folder into one long list. Yuck.

Playback, on the other hand, is Lion compatible and when I read it supported XBMC, that’s all I needed to know.

UPDATE: I should have added in the original review that there is one drawback to Playback – it doesn’t support metadata or artwork. That’s half the joy of XBMC, I know, but at the point I wrote this it was media only or nothing at all. In the latest Dharma version of XBMC for ATV2 they’re trying a new method for connecting to your Lion machines but it wasn’t playing nice with my setup for some reason; you may still find Playback useful.

So, if you’re on Lion, using XBMC on your AppleTV 2, and need a simple solution to fix the streaming, try this:

1) Download the Playback demo
2) Set up the preferences so that it’s got access to your media folders
3) Go to your XBMC app on your ATV2
4) Go to Videos and set up a new share
5) Click Browse
6) Select UPnP Devices
7) When the Playback installation for your computer appears, select it (in my case it was SithLord Playback)
8) Select the folder you want to use as a source (in my case I have a Films folder and a TV folder – you can only do one at a time so pick one for now)
9) Give it a name within XBMC
10) Save it

If you have multiple folders you want to share, repeat steps 4 to 10.

Now check it works. I haven’t found a way to make it appear in the TV or the Movies menus that XBMC displays as default, but everything is findable via the Videos menu, no problem.

Once you’ve got it working and you’re happy with it, head back over to Playback and buy a license, which is £10. Until then it limits your streaming to 30 minutes at a time and 2 videos per day.

Now, full disclosure, I’m hoping to get a free license for writing this blog about the app (see here), but I didn’t let that sway my opinion of Playback. This morning it has proved to be a painless way of getting ATV2 XBMC streaming working from my Lion iMac, and has the added bonus of working on my 360 as well, just in case I temporarily brick my ATV2 with further tinkering in the future (it’s happened before!).

So I hope this helps anyone that’s having trouble with their ATV2/XBMC since updating to Lion. Ideally I’d like to get my NFS shares working at some point but in the short term Playback has most definitely been a head-ache free alternative – with that caveat that artwork and metadata don’t show up.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter.

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Editorial Other Photographic

new website a-go-go!

I finally have my new website up and running. It’s pretty much the same as the old one but better, in my opinion, for having finally ditched that hateful chunk of buggy code they call Flash. This means I’ve also had to give up on SlideshowPro and while I’ll miss the very lovely SlideshowPro Director content management system, I will in absolutely no way whatsoever miss working with Flash.

So, goodbye headaches, hello mobile devices! Yes, the new site runs on pretty much any device you care to mention, at last!

It’s running on WordPress using a theme from GraphPaperPress called Sidewinder. This allows me to display my photos in a side-scrolling stream that users have complete control over. No more waiting for the picture you wanted to see to come round again on the slideshow.

It also allows me to use hassle-free menus to display links to individual collections of images, incorporate new features easily with plugins, and all the other lovely stuff that comes with WordPress. Ah, but doesn’t everyone complain that it’s not very stable under pressure? Don’t worry – in the extremely unlikely event that Mr John ‘Daring Fireball’ Gruber links to my site or something, I’ve got W3 Total Cache activated.

So have a look around and let me know if you manage to break it or if anything doesn’t work how it should. I am currently working on a Photoshelter page as well, for easier distribution of images to clients and in case anyone would like to buy prints or license images. Nobody ever does, but what the hell, building the site keeps me quiet of a weekend!

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Editorial Photographic Pictorial

T4 Behind The Scenes Photos

I’m very lucky to have two main jobs, both of which I enjoy – stills photography and television camera operation. I work on T4 as a camera operator a lot, and they just got a new set with lots of colourful neon lights so I was asked if I could bring in my camera and get some behind the scenes and action shots for the studio website. I also had a go at doing some for myself in black and white. I like to use the Nikon D700’s B&W mode. It’s a lot more flexible than most digital camera B&W modes, with extra controls for contrast, brightness, and colour filter to change tones of grey to suit the scene (I usually leave it on orange). The result is a nice punchy B&W with more character than if you just removed all the colour data like most B&W modes do.

(I’d still like to run them through PS for individual tweaks to contrast and brightness but these are all untouched, straight out of the camera.)

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Editorial iOS & Mac reviews Photographic Reviews

Hipstamatic: a comparison of the latest films and lenses

There’s been quite a few Hipstamatic lens/film packs released since I last posted my ‘every lens and film combination’ image last year. Actually, it turns out that a few of them were limited edition and they aren’t available any more. I stopped using Hipstamatic for quite a while and I missed a couple of these, including Melodie and Salvador 84. Personally I think it’s a shame they decided to make limited editions – I’d happily fork over the 59p each for sets that included these lenses so that I could have a complete set.

So, I currently have 9 lenses and 12 films installed in my copy of the app and so I made up a revised table of combinations. I did do a set of shots using one particular combo and then each of the flashes but to be honest I think the flash effects aren’t that great so I made an editorial decision not to bother with them for this, which took long enough as it is! 😉

(click to view large, or see the original over at Flickr)

Categories
How-Tos iOS & Mac how-tos

One way to fix an iTunes ‘Error 1013’

Last night I was updating my iPhone 4 to iOS 4.3 (from 4.2.1) and it got almost all the way through until it sought to verify the update with Apple and failed with error code 1013. The support document said this was likely to do with security software preventing iTunes from connecting to Apple but I had no problems with the iTunes Store (usually a dead giveaway) so I looked further and found that it’s to do with the hosts file on the computer needing a line edited.

I was just about to give it a try when I stumbled across references to the application TinyUmbrella causing this problem. I have used TinyUmbrella to grab the SHSH blobs for my AppleTV 2 so that I could jailbreak it safely (jailbreaking the ATV2 is highly advisable as it makes the device incredibly useful for things like XBMC). There’s actually a preference setting in the TinyUmbrella app that automatically alters the hosts file so that it forces checks to go through Cydia and not Apple and therefore allow jailbroken iOS software to go undetected.

Open the app, click the Advanced tab, uncheck the box marked ‘Set Hosts to Cydia on Exit’ and the update problem goes away.

Thought I’d post this in case it helps somebody else with the same problem without having to go editing the hosts file themselves.