I always wanted an Apple TV, but the lack of support for my favorite media server Plex has kept me away. I’ve tried Boxee and an Android TV-stick, but both had issues.
Now some clever folks have found a way to “run” Plex on an un-jailbroken Apple TV device. I say “run” since you are not really running a Plex Client. Instead they have reverse engineered the Apple Trailer app’s data structure and made Plex Connect. This app is run on a Windows, Mac or Linux machine in your network and intercepts the traffic from the tailer app on your Apple TV and instead of trailers return the list of media you have on your Plex server.
It’s a very simple yet elegant hack involving a simple DNS server and a web server written in Phyton. All “normal” requests from the ATV goes as normal, but any requests to trailers.apple.com will get intercepted and changed.
The result is the ability to view your Plex library on an unmodified ATV. The downside is that the App is called “Trailers” and not Plex, but that’s no biggie.
So thank you and keep up the great work.
Plex Connect (or “Plex @ aTV – think different…”)
We all want the pleasure of Plex on the big screen – in this case driven by an AppleTV, unfortunately:
- There is no App Store for the AppleTV.
- It is not currently possible to jailbreak the AppleTV3
- Only certain firmwares on the AppleTV2 have an untethered jailbreak (the current firmware does not)
- It is not possible to move between AppleTV2 firmwares unless the user has previously used a tool to specifically save unique signatures for their device
How does it work?
The basic idea is to:
- re-use a native AppleTV app (in this case Apple Trailers)
- re-route the Trailers app requests to your local Plex Media Server
- re-work the reply to fit into AppleTV’s XML communication scheme
- let iOS do the rest
- enjoy Plex on your unmodified AppleTV
FAQ: https://github.com/i…onnect/wiki/FAQ
Install guides: https://github.com/i…/Install-guides
How to report an issue: https://github.com/i…report-an-issue
Wiki: https://github.com/i…lexConnect/wiki
Roadmap: https://github.com/i…ct/wiki/Roadmap
