Apple TV

A few years ago one of my main system for consuming media on was my 2nd gen Apple TV with XBMC on it via ATVFlash but over time that has been replaced by Plex and Media Browser on my various devices. The Kodi team have announced that they are dropping support for the Apple TV and that Kodi 14.1 will be the last official version for the device. The development team say the reason for ending support includes no official development support from Apple, having to jailbreak the device and limited specs like only 256MB of memory.

If you are currently using an Apple TV with Kodi you should be ok for now and the great thing about XBMC is it’s available for a massive range of devices so there is no shortage of hardware alternatives.

Read the full explanation on the Kodi blog:

As the current maintainer of the AppleTV2 platform for Kodi, I wanted you to know that I have decided to stop official support for it. I know that the fact that XBMC/Kodi runs on Apple’s black puck has been the main reason for buying one for many people, but it has become a dead end for Kodi.

If you are currently using an AppleTV2 for Kodi, you may already have realised how the quality of the XBMC/Kodi experience has degraded on the device since the release of Frodo. The HD playback is unstable and liable to crash the device, and the overall performance is beginning to fall behind other platforms which are based on more recent hardware. From a developer’s point of view the AppleTV2 is a major challenge because Apple never released any Software Development Kit for it. The fact that XBMC/Kodi has ever been able to run on it is a testament to the countless hours of hacking by Scott Davilla and Edgar Huceke. I want to personally give a big thanks to both of them for all they have done with the box. Without this work XBMC/Kodi would never have been able to support the iOS platform at all, and yet today it remains alive and well on numerous tablets and phones.

Leave a Reply