You asked for it: XBMC for AppleTV2, iPad, iPhone4.
The XBMC team is proud to present our first ARM-based release, and it's a big one. Scott Davilla, with the help of Edgar (gimli) Hucek and Zeljko (amet) Ametovic and several other developers and testers, is finally ready to pull the curtain off of his fun little secret.
Context & Ripple Effects
XBMC has been circling Apple hardware since 2008, when it was first coaxed onto the original Apple TV alongside early boxee builds — boxee itself being a fork of the same codebase before its public beta in January 2010. The desktop releases kept pace too, with the redesigned 9.11 Camelot shipping at the end of 2009.
What changes today is the architecture: this is XBMC's first ARM build, led by Scott Davilla with Edgar Hucek and Zeljko Ametovic, targeting Apple TV 2, iPad and iPhone 4. That only matters because the SHAtter jailbreak demoed last October opened those devices to unsigned software — without it, there is no install path.
First-order effects
- Owners of a jailbroken Apple TV 2, iPad or iPhone 4 gain a full media-center front end on $99-to-pocket-sized hardware that Apple never intended for third-party playback apps.
Second-order effects
- Boxee now competes against its own ancestor running on the same Apple silicon it targets, while jailbreak tooling like SHAtter gets a mainstream reason to exist beyond tweaks.
Third-order effects
- The ARM port is the signal that home theater software no longer needs an x86 HTPC under the TV — if low-power mobile chips can carry XBMC, set-top boxes and phones become the platform, with power draw replacing raw CPU speed as the design constraint.
The trend: Open-source media centers are migrating from the PC to jailbroken ARM devices, making consumer gadgets into general-purpose living-room computers.