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OpenBSD on an AppleTV 1st Gen
Introduced in 2006, the Apple TV is a mediaplayer for the big screen. Whereas later generations are locked down black boxes, literally, the first generation is an extremely hackable device. It is powered by an Intel Pentium M processor and originally shipped with a customized version of MacOS X Tiger.
Hardware
The modelnumber for the first generation Apple TV is A1218 and has the following specs:
| Part | Description |
|---|---|
| CPU | 1 GHz Intel “Crofton” Pentium M |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 with 64 MB of VRAM |
| Memory | 256 MB of 400 MHz DDR2 SDRAM |
| Storage | 40 or 160 GB internal HDD |
| Connectivity | BCM94321MC dual-band 802.11b/g and 802.11 draft-n WiFi |
The dimensions are 28 mm (height) x 200 mm (width) x 200 mm (depth). The original unit weighs 1,1 kilograms
Mods
CrystalHD
Broadcom BCM970012 and BCM970015 Crystal HD card boards can be installed in the Apple TVs mini PCIe slot as a replacement for the Broadcom BCM4321 wireless card. These boards enable some software to decode H.264 video content using a dedicated hardware decoder chip instead of software decoding H.264 using the main system CPU.
The standard Apple TV will handle software-decoding of SD and standard profile 720p content but the 1GHz CPU chokes on higher profile 720p and all 1080p content unless you spend many (many) hours painstakingly re-encoding videos.