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AppleTV 2nd Generation and SHSH Blobs

I am a huge Apple fan, and I have three 2nd generation AppleTVs that I use to watch streaming media in different rooms of my house. I have hacked them all so I can stream a wide variety of formats and stream directly from a large SMB file share I have. I also like checking out new versions of the operating system, but insist that I can roll back to previous versions in case something breaks.

Sadly, Apple works really hard to prevent this, they (understandably) want fewer versions out in the wild to support… so once a new version comes out they stop signing the blobs needed to roll back to the older version; which is frustrating to someone who wants to be able to back out a recent change.

iOS 8 has been announced and will likely trigger a new version of the AppleTV software in the next few days… so I went about backing up my current versions (all running AppleTV version 5.3, aka: iOS 6.1.4) and the current version from Apple (AppleTV 6.2, aka: iOS 7.1.2). Normally I use TinyUmbrella to do this, but TinyUmbrella has become fussy… and I can’t save my SHSH blobs with it since 5.2/6.1), and one of the three cannot even do that (it has always been more finicky).

iFaith can download the current version (6.2/7.1.2) but it is a different kind of blob, and I can’t use that to generate a new OS yet (still learning though) and iFaith can’t grab the current firmware in complete format from any of the three AppleTVs I have – though it was able to grab 5.2.1/6.1.3 according to documentation… I can’t verify as Apple is no longer signing those blobs.

RedSn0w does not support AppleTV at all as near as I can tell, at least none of mine.

Seas0nPass fails to save the new blobs, but can reliably get be back to 5.3/6.1.4 (the last known jailbroken version) every time so I get my XBMC back… Note: Seas0nPass depends on iTunes, and sometimes having an older version of iTunes helped a lot.

My other iOS devices (iPhones, iPads) all backup easily in all the above programs, it is only the AppleTVs that are giving me fits… Is anyone else have success with TinyUmbrella since iOS 7 came out?

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