Great news for those of us with first generation Apple TVs. The good people over at App Dynamic, those behind the iPhone and iPad app Remote HD, have released a hack for the Apple TV the enables Remote HD to work with the Apple TV as well as enable AirPlay on it. This works for people who have a first generation Apple TV that is hacked. Continue reading to find out how to hack your Apple TV and how to install Remote HD.

The first thing you need to do is find a USB flash drive to create the patchstick on. Download the patchstick creator from the atvusb-creator project and follow the instructions on their site to create a recovery. Basically you download the application with the link at the top of their site then run it and insert a USB flash drive into your computer. Select the drive under “USB Target Device” then hit “create” It will take a few minutes to download the Apple TV software and create a bootable patch stick. WARNING: this process will format your usb drive so make sure your data is backed up. Once the stick is created insert it into the back of your Apple TV and press and hold the Menu and - buttons on the remote to restart the Apple TV. It should automatically boot from the drive and run the installation. If it doesn’t boot from the drive you will probably need to try with a different usb flash drive. 

Now that you have your Apple TV hacked you should have two new menus. One called “Software Menu” and another “Launcher” that contains XMBC and Boxee. You need to install the Remote HD app next to get AirPlay and RemoteHD working. You can follow the instructions on RemoteHD’s Website or look at my shortened instructions below.

SSH into your Apple TV using Terminal on the Mac or what ever software your prefer. Simple open Terminal located in the /Applications/Utilities/ and type or paste in the following:

ssh frontrow@appletv.local

Password: frontrow

Next enter the following three commands one by one (each line is a separate command to enter into the terminal) to download, uncompress and install the RemoteHD plugin. If you are asked for a password again enter frontrow like you did to start the SSH connection.

scp ssh.remotehd.com:RemoteHelper.tar .

tar xvf RemoteHelper.tar

./install-RemoteHelper

Restart your Apple TV either by the option to restart the finder in the Software Menu or by holding down the Menu and - buttons. Or just unplug the darn thing from power.

Thats it! You should now have your Apple TV hacked and have three new menu options on your bar. You can now connect and remotely see your Apple TV screen using the RemoteHD iPhone or iPad app and you can run XMBC or Boxee. I would avoid the Software Menu however. It is currently a little buggy and was making my Apple TV crash and restart. 

Pretty cool right, of wait whats that you say? Your menu is ugly and cluttered? Well we can fix that pretty easily. Just have to edit a few files. First SSH back into the Apple TV and change directories to see all the plugins that appear in the menu.

cd  /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns

ls

You should see something along the lines of this:

-bash-2.05b$ ls

Contents Remote Helper.frappliance

Internet.frappliance Settings.frappliance

Movies.frappliance SoftwareMenu.frappliance

Music.frappliance TV.frappliance

Photos.frappliance XBMCLauncher.frappliance

Podcasts.frappliance

Each of these plugins can be edited to rearrange the order of your menu items. In this example there are 10 plugins appearing in the Apple TV menu. I want to make RemoteHelper appear last. To do this I need to edit it’s Info.plist file which is located here.

” /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/
XBMCLauncher.frappliance/Contents/Info.plist “

To edit this file we use the sudo nano command. Simple enter the following into the terminal to edit the file:

” sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/
XBMCLauncher.frappliance/Contents/Info.plist “

The contents of the file should open and you should see a whole bunch of entrys like <key> or <string>. We want to find the following entry which should be near the bottom of the file.

<key>FRAppliancePreferedOrderValue</key>

<real>0</real>

The number value in between <real>#</real> is the placement on the menu. I want my RemoteHelper plugin to appear last so I change the key to number 10.

<key>FRAppliancePreferedOrderValue</key>

<real>10</real>

Now press Control + x to exit the file. Press “y” to save the file and return to save it as the same name. Becareful not to change any other values before saving. You may want to back up the file before saving it if your unsure of what your doing. Once the file is saved you can restart the Apple TV Finder again in the Software Menu for your changes to take effect. To edit the order of all your plugins so they fit our needs best simple use the sudo nano command for the other plugins.

Enter:

” sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/
PLUGIN-NAME.frappliance/Contents/Info.plist “

and change “PLUGIN-NAME” to the name of the plugin you want to change. Follow the steps again to set the order value key and save and exit the file.

Hope this helps some people who are new to hacking their Apple TV or have had struggles in the past. Let me know if you need any help in the comments.