Originally Posted by ash

Try to re-bless the original ATV partition to make it bootable again.

I can't help you with the second question, as I don't have any experience with non-standard-sized ATV drives - sorry.

Would this do the trick?

Code:

sudo bless -folder '/System/Library/CoreServices' -setOF

There is probably a really obvious answer to this. I downloaded the 10.5.8 image and I get a OSBoot mount on my desktop. I have a freshly partitioned disk and now I assume I copy the files from OSBoot into my partition. When I simply drag all the files/folders using Finder I get some error messages that say I don't have permission and the operation will not finish completely.

I found this advice in the thread: use the disk utility to restore the image into the new partition.

Unfortunately I get this error from disk utility: Restore Failure Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored.

Does anyone know how to resolve this?

---- Solved! There is a menu item in the disk utility "Scan Image For Restore". I ran this on the image and now the file copy seems to be working. Crazy! You'd think the restore function would kick off a scan itself.

So I got osx up and running on my AppleTV very easily thanks to the downloadable image. Unfortunately my grand plan of encoding video using the Elgato Turbo h264 HD has ground to a halt.

I can install the Elgato software and get everything started, however just a few minutes into the encoding process the kernel panics. Memory, CPU and thread count seem ok up until the crash.

FYI, I am connecting to a smb share (ubuntu) to read the large source video files and I have tried both writing the resultant small video file to the smb share and the local filesystem. I am also using a bootable USB memory stick to hold osx.

Installed the 10.5.8 build and it works perfect. Only thing was the sound, very low output but I fixed that by using a usb audio in/ouput. Now sound is also working like it should and i'm very happy :-))

BTW, for all, the usb sound solution is easy and cheap, so give it a try... i just got a usb in/output device that has two clinch for input and two for output and only costs about $20. Plug and play so instand working sound

Originally Posted by ebbenezer66

I am thinking of giving it a try. It seems like a good match for video encoding.Since the turbo 264 does all the hard CPU work.

I'm afraid I can't recommend it. I just bought the Turbo 264HD and installed the software update and within a few minutes the AppleTV OSX kernel crashed with a panic message all over the screen.

I'm not sure what's going on and I might give it another try from scratch; avoiding using the network for holding files.

If you get it working I'd love to hear about it.

Another interesting thing is on my iMac the Turbo 264HD still uses about 105% CPU. It certainly goes really really fast though.

Originally Posted by bluepill

I'm afraid I can't recommend it. I just bought the Turbo 264HD and installed the software update and within a few minutes the AppleTV OSX kernel crashed with a panic message all over the screen.

I'm not sure what's going on and I might give it another try from scratch; avoiding using the network for holding files.

If you get it working I'd love to hear about it.

Another interesting thing is on my iMac the Turbo 264HD still uses about 105% CPU. It certainly goes really really fast though.

This won't work - the problem is the decoding of the source video is done by the CPU (Perian/Quicktime) - this is cpu-intensive.

There was talk (a long time ago) about davilla writing a crystal-hd quicktime plugin after he was done getting it working with xbmc. If that ever became more than a dream, you could use crystal-hd to decode and Turbo 264HD to encode and have very low cpu utilisation.

No idea why you would bother as crystal HD would playback most things just fine without needing any transcoding.

Originally Posted by Olethros

No idea why you would bother as crystal HD would playback most things just fine without needing any transcoding.

The only reason I am interested is to convert my library of DVD & Bluray for streaming off my server. A cheap little box to do this would be really useful.

Originally Posted by bluepill

The only reason I am interested is to convert my library of DVD & Bluray for streaming off my server. A cheap little box to do this would be really useful.

Yeah but crystal HD can playback most of that.. Especially if you put linux on the ATV and run xbmc you can get 1080p output and decoding of most blueray rips.

If you want to use the AppleTV OS - you are limited to 720p playback (decode is 1080p but downscaled to 720p for playback) with crystal HD and xbmc.

Only if you want to sync via iTunes do you need to worry about converting to mp4 container and transcoding to h.264 that meets the bitrate and resolution requirements of the apple TV's built in mpeg-4 hardware assisted decoding.

ash, thanx a lot for you great job!
I've installed your image 10.5.5 and have to say that it works flawlessly.
I was at first using jon's image, and it was ok, but I was really unhappy with the faulty driver for internal soundcard in that version and not being able to fix it myself I had to use external soundcard, overall performance of 10.5.8 os was not so great either, being sluggish and sometimes very slow.
But, now, when using your image, besides the fact that internal sound works great, I have to say that OS performance is much much better than in 10.5.8, I can even say that it's lightning fast considering it's 256mb ram.
Just to demonstrate to other people not believing in apple tv running mac os x in a usable way: I am constantly running transmission for downloading torrents with web interface on for remote controlling it and dyndns updater daemon running in background for accessing my apple tv from outside without knowing my dynamic ip, automatic for automatic download of tv torrents from rss feeds, airfoil speakers for streaming music to apple tv, itunes with 200+ gb music library loaded, with afp and smb sharing on I can easily watch movies over my home wifi network from mac or pc, with all that I can still open safari for some occasional web browsing without feeling some performance issues.
Bottom line, I am very satisfied with my apple tv running mac os x now
Thanx again, ash.

P.S. every file i open in quicktime crashes it, no such problem in vlc, does anyone else have this issue and know what the problem is?