Maintenance: Allow hiding of Apple TV menu items

Would it be possible to allow the user to hide menu items? E.g. I don't care about MLB.com so would like to hide that from the Internet menu.

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Would it be possible to allow the user to hide menu items? E.g. I don't care about MLB.com so would like to hide that from the Internet menu.

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Have to agree with this. MLB (which I assume is Major League Baseball or something) has no relevance in the UK, and yet Apple leave that active and instead remove the 'TV Shows' menu? Weird.

Being able to remove / hide certain items would be great - I'd even be happy to do it manually via ssh if I could work out how to edit files and what I needed to edit.

You should use a program like Filezilla (SSH) and go looking in /private/var/stash/Applications/AppleTV.app/Appliances/Internet.frappliance.  In the info.plist file there will probably be a setting you can uncheck to hide MLB.  I haven't updated to ios 4.3 on my ATV but on my version all the other things are in that list.  Haven't tested hiding any of them though.

I did exactly this and it works!

Using Filezilla, I added a new SSH site to the Site Manager - using the default username 'root' and password 'alpine'

I went to the directory mentioned above and using PlistEdit Pro (a free app from the Apple website), I edited info.plist on the Apple TV. There's a dropdown within that plist called FRApplianceCategory descriptors, within that Category 0 should be Netflix - and Category 1 (which had no mention of MLB) is the placeholder for MLB. Simply delete, and it's gone!

Job done.

Good info, thanks!

 

Still, a GUI would be nice...

I have to concur regarding adding this feature at some point. It would certainly make a nice addition. I have an Apple TV setup at my office where I work and have used the native Parental Controls to disable some of the original menu items (Apple Movies, TV Shows), as well as to ask for a code on lauching Netflix. While this would be fine, they forgot/failed to include MLB and NBA in those options.

Additionally, I wish either Apple themselves or perhaps with this project, we’d be able to re-order the secondary menu items. Such as in alpabetical order. To my eyes, it seems illogical and an eye sore to see the items under “Internet” listed in an arbitrary fashion.

 

A GUI would obviously be lovely, but in the meantime you CAN reorder these things, and remove the ones you don’t need, quite simply by editing the plists within the Apple TV. 

 

I have described how to remove MLB a few posts above - in the same plist where you remove MLB, there’s also a “preferred order” marker where you can move “Internet” down the list. Additionally, you can put the submenu items in the order you want them.

 

Best,

Chris

Thanks for the pointers. My problem is slightly different and I wonder if you can help me. 

I would like to hide and/or reorder the actual menu items on the ‘home screen’ of my Apple TV. For example, I would like the Media player to be on the left most of the welcome screen. At the moment, I have NitoTV, then Internet, then Computers, then Browser, then Settings, then Media Player. I’d like to be able to hide NitoTV, and put Media Player in its place. 

I have looked through the plists but I do not know which one to look into. 

Do you happen to have the answer to that?

Thanks, 

Fred

You need to edit the info.plist for each menu item.

 

/var/stash/Applications/AppleTV.app/Appliances

 

then go to Internet.frappliance and edit info.plist

 

You can change the display name of the item and there’ll also be a field called PreferredOrder or something like that, set to something like 2.00000000000

Change this to 1.000000000 for first, or 9.000000000 for last, etc.

 

You have to do this for each menu item.

 

Ive done this too, reordered so YouTube is at the top, however the section above the menus still shows the daft MLB stuff, not the “focussed” menu item below - anyone know how to fix this in a plist file somehow?

Beta6 now includes the ability to hide unwanted menus.

This feature can be accessed through the Maintenance --> Settings --> Show/Hide Menus menu. 

Yeah I know that but only whole menus, I want to reorder submenu items and hide certain ones eg hide MLB but keep Youtube in Internet

I think I will give the reorder a bash but I am running windows and not osx

any help on windows would be appreciated??

It would be awesome to have some kind of admin-tool on mac/win that handles your menu items.

So that you could arrange and rename things from your pc… is there any chance to make this real? I´m always nearly ruining my ATV when editing plist files  :wink:

is a plist file just a text file?  Can we just edit the text file with NOTEPAD under the PC and then save it back and be okay?  Or is there some special structure that gets messed up?

I want to do this, but I have no mac to use the plist tool.  only have a PC.

 

I tried to disable MLB, but the /private/var/stash folder is empty. Has the place changed, or what could be the problem?

no such menu in “settings” in my beta7 -> only ATV Updates, Submit Diagnostic Info, Manage Backups and Relaunch ATV

 

nothing about hiding menu-items :frowning:

Same for me. Any chance to get this back?

Or even better, to get this back with the function to hide a complete menu or/and some points (like MLB) only.

I strongly suspect hat this was removed because the mechanism used no longe works on iOS4.3. That version of iOS certainly broke Overflow - the other way of hiding menus. I must admit though that it would be nice to have such a capability back again.

I agree, I would really like a way of simplifying the menus through the GUI.