Fix HDCP on HDMI controller AppleTV
After I build my AppleTV hard drive from Scratch, I did some hacking so my AppleTV now can play any file formats and use external USB hard drive to store media (500GB). The big problem occurred when I rented “I am a legen HD” from iTunes and tried to play on my AppleTV (connected to Acer LCD). There is an error said
“This content requires HDCP for playback.
HDCP isn’t supported by your HDMI connection.
Use the component video connection to watch this content.”
So I desperately cannot watch my rented movie unless I change my expensive HDMI to cheap Component cable. I don’t want to mess up with my cables which are quite difficult to reach, so I did a little google and found out that they are many similar cases over the net. I tried many thing but finally this is the step that works for me.
We need to update HDMI controller in AppleTV. Here are the steps.
- Go to http://mesu.apple.com/version.xml with Firefox (does not work on my Safari)
- Use Firefox to download 2 files (These file might change upon AppleTV firmware version)
hdmiutil
FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex
- Copy those two files to AppleTV
- Use Terminal to run this command
$ chmod +x hdmiutil
$ chmod +x FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex
$ ./hdmiutil FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex
- Terminal should respond with this message
hdmiutil - HDMI Flash Utility Version 1.1000 (Mac)
For Programming Silicon Image's SiI1930 (DVI-HDMI) microcontroller.
Copyright (C) 2006-2008, NVIDIA Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Using default I2C configuration on Mac platform.
Temporarily disabling hotplug interrupt processing...
Firmware Filename: FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!! Do not interrupt power or hotplug displays during flashing process. !!!
!!! This might take a while to complete (approx 5 min for each file) !!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sector Erase 0%........10%.......20%........30%.......40%........
50%.......60%........70%.......80%........90%......100%
Programming 0%..........10%..........20%..........30%..........
40%..........50%..........60%..... (goes till 100%)
OK - file FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex firmware flashed successfully!
Re-enabling hotplug interrupt processing...
- After unplug and re-plug, your AppleTV should be able to play rented HD movie.
Enjoy ^_^
Downgrade iPhone firmware 2.0 to 1.4
Ok, I am stupid enough to upgrade my iPhone firmware from 1.4 to 2.0 via iTunes. So it took me 2 full days to figure out how to bring my iPhone back to life. Here is how I did.
You absolutely need iTunes 7.5 to restore your firmware 1.4 . I don’t want to mess up with my iTunes on my Mac (of course, because of all my precious music) so I just D/L iTunes 7.5 Windows version and run on Parallel Desktop.
- On Windows, when you connect your iPhone to iTunes 7.5, it will tell you to restore it. (If you first connect your iPhone with firmware 2.0 to Windows, it might say that your phone is not compatible with this version of iTunes. Dont’ worry about this message, just close the popup)
- Press Shift + Restore (Option+Restore on Mac) and select 1.4 firmware.
- When finish, you should get 1015 error (if you don’t try again). Don’t worry about the error. Close your iTunes, the iPhone will stuck in recovery mode.
- Use iBrickr to kick it out of recovery state.
- I have to restore 2 times in order to kick it out of recovery mode.
- This is the most important!!! YOU HAVE TO DOWNGRADE BASE BAND FROM 04.05.04_G to 04.04.05_G
- I used ZiPhone patch newest version to downgrade baseband (I tried many methods on the internet, none of them work for me)
- Once you downgrade baseband you should get signal even though you did not do any jailbreak,activate or unlock.
- Now you can use any method you want to unlock the phone. I used ZiPhone on mac to do everything.
Now I have to keep my iTunes 7.5 on Windows parallel just incase I mess up anything again because now we know that 7.7 have some kind of hacking protection.
UPDATE : iClarified has a very nice tutorial plus video instraction to downgrade the baseband now.
UPDATE2: The Dev-Team released PawnageTool 2.1 which can easily Jailbreak/Activate/Unlock 2.0 firmware. The nice tutorial can be found at iClarified
Build AppleTV Take2 harddrive
For someone who accidentally formatted or bricked TV hard drive (like I did), here are steps that work for me on Leopard (10.5.4)
- Either you got new hard drive or bricked hard drive, you got to connect hard drive to you mac
- Use diskutil list to see your disk partition (we need to know where an TV hard drive is)
- Here is what proper partitions should look like when you finish (please note /dev/disk1 as you TV hard drive)
- Then delete and re-create partition table using command below in Terminal
gpt destroy /dev/disk1
gpt create /dev/disk1
- Now we need to partition harddrive, first create EFI partition
gpt add -b 40 -i 1 -s 409600 -t efi /dev/disk1
- Then create Apple_Recovery partition
gpt add -b 409640 -i 2 -s 819200 -t 5265636F-7665-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC /dev/disk1
- Next is OSBoot which is where the OSX fit in
gpt add -b 819240 -i 3 -s 1843200 -t hfs /dev/disk1
- The last partition is Media which is all the movies and songs are located. This partition you need to fill in the *size* part your self by looking at the end size using command
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1sudo gpt show /dev/disk1
gpt add -b 1843240 -i 4 -s *size* -t hfs /dev/disk1
- After partitioning, we need to format OSBoot and Media partition in HFS+ Format
diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" OSBoot /dev/disk1s3
diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" Media /dev/disk1s4
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
- Now you ready to restore OSBoot partition to working state. Download the latest AppleTV Take 2 software by checking link here http://mesu.apple.com/version.xml
- Then you can use Disk Utility to easily restore OSBoot partition
- Set the source to the newly AppleTV image that you just downloaded (2Z694-5428-3.dmg), and drag the OSBoot partition to Destination. After that press “Restore” button.
- This process took about 3 minutes, after this step you’re done.
- Connect TV hard drive back to TV
- Once you startup the TV, it will create EFI image in TV automatically
- I did the Factory restore to make sure that everything is working fine.
- Now your TV is ready to use (and to be hacked ^_^)
Thanks for http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Prepare_a_Hard_Drive and http://smallnum.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-creating-apple-tv-from-scratch.html for a very useful information.
How to restore AppleTV or upgrade?
I think there are many people accidentally delete or format theirTV hard drive (like I did). Obviously we need to buy a new hard drive or restore damaged hard drive to the functional state. There are many thread regarding this subject on over internet, but I think my method is simplest and easiest. Here is what I did.
1. Get the latest TV image from link below
2. Connect your hard drive to your Mac.
3. Open the Disk Utility application. You should see new firmware that you just downloaded and TV and see your new connected hard drive.
4. Click on your new hard drive and go to restore tab.
5. Drag firmware to the ‘source’ field and new hard drive to the ‘destination’ field, as in picture below.
6. Click on restore and you’re done.
PS. This method is working on my machine which I spent less than 10 minutes for the whole process. However, there is no ‘recovery’ partition created on this method (which is not important since everything on my AppleTV take 2.0.2 is working fine)
Schedule auto start application
OK, here is my problem. My internet here in Melbourne is cheapter from 2am – 11am. So I’d like to schedule Transmission – a bit torrent application – to start automatically every night at 2am. Here is what I did.
- Open Automator and drag the Launch Application to the work flow area
- Choose your desired application
- Now save your automator go File > Save and choose save as Application
- Now it’s time to schedule your script. Launch iCal and create an event
- Choose your desired time
- On Alarm option choose to open file and choose your created automator
With the combination of Automator and iCal, we can set the timer of any applicaiton to auto start with only a few click. I think it’s a cool thing about Leopard.
Play rmvb and rm on OSX
Rmvb and rm (Real Movie) format is a video format that I hate the most. It’s quite annoying when I play this video format with Real player and tons of ads showing up without warning. However, it’s inevitable if sometime I have to watch some movies in which available only this format.
I just found the easiest way to view this video format on OSX without Real player. I’m using Mplayer and download Binary codec package, double click to install the codecs then you can view most of the video formats. Enjoy watching RMVB ^_^
Swap Control & Command key in Bootcamp
It’s a bad news to me that I have to use Windows for my work because there is no way that I can use “ArcGIS” on my lovely Mac. So I did install Windows XP (no Vista ever of course) and use VMware to run Windows with my Windows partition in Bootcamp.
Now I face the big problem because I used to my Command + C, Command +V …. but in Windows, Control button is used instead. There is no Keyboard mapping in Windows XP (only available in Vista).
What I did is I swap Command key and Control key by edit some registry by following this How to.
However if you don’t need to mess up with registry, I did put the executable “remap” that you can just download and run it on Windows. After reboot, the key will swap for you automatically
UPDATE: I am testing on vmware fusion 2.0 and it works. More info here
UPDATE2: Now I don’t have any problem swapping keys anymore since I have been using Parallel Desktop 4 . So I totally recommend checking out Parallel Desktop instead of VMware fusion.
Favicon & OSX
Favicon is a little icon infront of your URL in the address bar and tab (if your browser supported) . You can see that I have my own picture as my favicon. Here how I did it.
- Prepare your image and resize your picture to 16 x 16 pixel using your favorite editor. I prefer ImageTool , it’s free and lightweight.
- Now convert your resized image using ImageWell (also free ^_^) to .ico format.
Favicon & OSX
- Launch IcoMaker and drag your prepared picture to IcoMaker application.
- Save the file as favicon.ico and upload it into the root directory of your website.
- Check if you index page has this code in “head” tag
- Done ! refresh your page and you will see your lovely favicon ^_^
UPDATE I just found the easiest way to create favicon here. This website can help you create favicon with your own image or you can create your own favicon from scratch.
Default encoding on Mail.app
I’d like to set Thai to be my default language in Mail.app but I couldn’t find where to set it in Mail preference . So I did a little google and found the solution is very simple. In my case, Thai can use either Windows-874 and TIS-620. Here is the command that I run on Terminal and it works pretty well.
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset “TIS-620″
Remote AppleTV & Macbook
I really like Apple Remote because of its size and design. Only one drawback, it’s quite difficult to find the combination of the keys to do some tasks such as pair and unpair remote. As a result, I am trying to put up the combinations that I’ve found .
Apple Remote
* To pair the remote with Macbook : Menu + Select/Play/Pause
* To unpair the remote with Macbook : Menu + Previou/Rewind
To pair Apple TV with the included remote
* Choose Settings from the Apple TV main menu.
* Choose Pair Remote Control.
You can also press and hold the Menu and Next/Fast-forward buttons for 6 seconds to pair Apple TV and the remote.
To unpair Apple TV with a previously paired remote
1. Choose Settings from the Apple TV main menu.
2. Choose Unpair Remote.
When you’ve successfully unpaired the lost remote, Apple TV displays a broken chainlink () symbol above a picture of a remote. You can now pair Apple TV with a new remote.
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