I had a Monday full of stuff to do already when I got a call this morning that one of my inventory deliveries had arrived at my postbox via freight.

So a whole bunch of stuff didn’t get done, but half the shipment got reprocessed for dispatch and was sent out again.

As I was dealing with that I plugged away at jailbreaking the Apple TV. After a great deal of expected failure, it finally took, and I was able to get XBMC and other stuff on it.

XBMC behaves as expected, no terrible issues in getting it to see and use local LAN UPnP sources, audio configurable and so forth. So I added it to the a/v stack.

The first issue (which is pretty weak sauce) is that the native resolution of the old projector is 1024×768. The unit supports that natively, excellent news. But in playing back non-iTunes media XBMC just tosses the video stream out at the display resolution. Happily, it also provides an extensive set of config options to allow you to reformat the video to match the aspect ratio.

So, I figured I was basically done, finally. I figured, what the hell, take a look at whatever spring training games were on MLB.tv. I had configured the service in three separate ways during setup and had thought that was overkill.

So, I try the Apple TV native version of the service. The selected game begins to play and then quits, displaying a message to the effect that the game can’t be displayed because it requires HDCP compliant hardware.

Fuck. And also, fuck that. The projector was manufactured prior to HDCP even existing. I tried a few other tricks, including AirPlay video mirroring from the iPhone, but the demon lobbyist asshole motherfuckers of HDCP, the very scurrilous spawn of murder and evil themselves, had got there before me.

So, no, I’m not done yet. Don’t expect me to write about here, because you can be damn sure that while I believe in freedom of speech, I don’t live in a country where I feel that I can practice it.