Boxee brings iPlayer to Apple TV
Update 8/1/09: Boxee now supports BBC iPlayer out of the box!
One thing I have been waiting for on the Apple TV is access to the BBC’s iPlayer. I recently discovered Boxee which is an open-source media centre for Mac, Windows and Apple TV based on a fork of XBMC. It has a very nice and easy to use interface which will index all your video, music and photos and show you summary, ratings, trailers etc based around your content. Very handy for finding info about movies I have copied onto the Apple TV!
Today I stumbled across a plugin for Boxee/XBMC which allows you to view content from the BBC iPlayer, it doesn’t come preinstalled with Boxee however instructions can be found on their forums, I found that it works very well on the Apple TV playing content from all their channels and most popular lists with minimal effort.
If you haven’t patched your Apple TV to run SSH already theres a handy patch stick creator that will unlock your Apple TV and install Boxee aptly called atvusb-creator and your ready to go with Boxee. However if have already have SSH and nitoTV installed (like did) you can simply copy the atv-xbmc-launcher installer onto you Apple TV and follow the instructions on their Wiki once the menu item is installed you can press Update and it will download and install Boxee for you.
Once you have Boxee up and running on your Apple TV copy the plugin across and edit the source.xml then should should see a nice BBC iPlayer icon under Video->Internet!
December 31st, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Those images aren’t for AppleTV? I’ve recently put Boxee on my ATV, do you have a step by step install that’s a bit more descriptive?
January 3rd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
The screenshots where taken from my Mac, but following the iPlayer guide from the Boxee forum you can also install it on your Apple TV. The only different is that you need to SFTP to your Apple TV using something like WinSCP or Cyberduck connect to your Apple TV and browse to: /Applications/Boxee.app/Contents/Resources/Boxee/plugins/video/ and then follow the rest of the guide.