We hardly see as much love for jailbroken Apple TVs as we see for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, but an upcoming project dubbed Spartan is drumming up some attention after being touted as “the first tvOS file browser” in a post shared on /r/jailbreak.
Spartan appears to be a work in progress, but it’s going to be a powerful SwiftUI-based way to interact with locally-stored files on supported Apple TVs running tvOS 14.0 and later. Support for tvOS 13.0 and later may come at a later date.
As shown in the screenshot examples above, users can not only browse their system, but batch-select files, view different kinds of media, see information about different files, and even open .plist files.
Citing the project’s GitHub page, Spartan is currently capable of the following types of actions on compatible Apple TVs:
– Browse file directory
– View and edit text files
– Watch videos
– Play audio (and view metadata)
– Create folders
– Create files
– Save folders or files to Favorites
– Get info about a file
– Rename a file
– Move a file or files to Trash (or if in Trash, delete them)
– Move a file or files to a given directory (if a single file, you can rename it)
– Copy a file to a new file path (and optionally, rename it)
– View images
– View plist files (both xml and bplist)
– //BROKEN Execute binaries
– Compress and uncompress .zip archives
– Search a directory and its subdirectories for a file or directory
In the future, the developer plans to add the following features:
– Don’t assume a file path is a directory in ContentView (you can specify a file path to a non-folder and it will open the proper view) (this will probably never happen)
– Add info to ImageView and VideoPlayerView
– Plist editor
– Spawn binaries
– Root helper
– And more…
Spartan is ready to be tested by anyone who wants to try it out. This will require compiling the project in Xcode 14.3 or newer.
To learn more about Spartan, you can visit the project’s GitHub page.
Are you excited about Spartan? Or do you not even bother to jailbreak your Apple TV? Let us know in the comments section down below.