Sunday, January 30, 2011

How to support Chinese in XBMC on ATV2

XBMC has built-in multi-lingral support.  However, the font that shipped with it is not unicode and not support all the languages. 
In order to view Chinese character, you need to download arialudi.ttf true type font from the web (just google it).
After downlad the font to your local drive.  You need to copy it to ATV2 box.
Assuming your font file is named arialuni.ttf and stored in your local folder named Downloads.
Coping files through ssh need to done by scp command.  So open your terminal and key in the following commands:

There are 2 locations you need to copy the fonts to:
1. ATV system fonts location, enter the following command in terminal
>scp Downloads/arialuni.ttf root@<your ATV2 ip address>:/Applications/XBMC.frappliance/XBMCData/XBMCHome/media/Fonts

2. Skin font location (Confluence)
>scp Downloads/ARIALUNI.TTF root@<your ATV2 ip address>:/Applications/XBMC.frappliance/XBMCData/XBMCHome/addons/skin.confluence/fonts

After copying the font over to both locations, ssh to ATV and issue the following commands:

>cd /
>cd Applications/XBMC.frappliance/XBMCData/XBMCHome/addons/skin.confluence/fonts
>mv DejaVuSans.ttf backup_original.font (Backup your original font)
>mv arialuni.ttf DejaVuSans.ttf (override the default Confluence font)

Now go to XBMC menu --> Settings --> International
> Change language to Chinese if you want the menu to be in Chinese, otherwise leave it as English (simple or traditional)
> Change character-set to GBK or Big-5, this is important to view Chinese characters
> Then go to XBMC menu --> settings --> skin
> Change skin language to Arial Based
> Finally, go to Setting --> Video --> Subtitle
> Change language to Chinese and font to arialuni.ttf

Done.  Now the XBMC should be in Chinese:



How to install XBMC on Apple TV 2

To install the popular XBMC media center on Apple TV 2 (ATV2), you first need to jailbreak it then install the xbmc remotely using ssh.

1. Jailbreak ATV2
    SeasOnPass is a Mac application that allows you to easily jailbreak ATV2.
    Just follow the step on this page.

2. Install XBMC
On XBMC offical site, there are steps to install XBMC. I extracted as below:

$ ssh root@<your ATV2 IP address> 
(The password should be "alpine" if you haven't changed it)
$ apt-get install wget

$ wget -O- http://apt.awkwardtv.org/awkwardtv.pub | apt-key add -

$ echo "deb http://apt.awkwardtv.org/ stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/awkwardtv.list

$ echo "deb http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/atv2 ./" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.list

$ apt-get update

$ apt-get install org.xbmc.xbmc-atv2 

3. Verify that your ATV2 now have XBMC on the menu