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alex_free

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 24, 2020
1,093
2,335
The iPhone 4 is my favorite phone. I daily drove it on iOS 7 back in the iOS 8 days. I had always dreamed of an unteathered, completely offline iOS 4 downgrade with hacktivation back then because iOS 7 destroyed it performance wise.

Since the above is now possible (the future rocks!) I took the plunge. Early serial number, so it can go down to as low as iOS 4.1. That's where it is now. Youtube is a no-go on such an old iOS. There is that russion youtube front end you can use, but it was pretty slow and janky.

Then I remembered, the PowerPC Media Center 7 Web Interface! Not everyone might remember this, since it was from 2020 and got accidentally broken in later PPCMC7 updates. What it did was incredible. It is a way to interact with PPCMC7 using the most ancient web browsers ever. It supports Netscape on Mac OS 9 and the latest Firefox on Linux. What it was originally designed to do was to provide an automated download/conversion to QuickTime 6 (Mac OS 9) compatible file formats, so that you could essentially use PPCMC7 from Mac OS 9 via a web browser and ancient PHP. To this day, the web interface is the entire sum of my web dev knowledge.

So I thought, why not add an option to download H.264 360p? That requires no conversion (super fast), and....
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(Yes, you can just tap the video and stream it from your PowerPC Mac)

Notes:
-Multiple downloads at one time should now work (unlike before). Multiple concurrent downloads will be extremely slow though unless you have a beefy G5. I recommend only one connection to the web interface at a time.
- This is a PANTHER optimized build. The TIGER optimized build will be even faster.
- If you get a timeout message in Safari, your download will eventually complete (just keep checking the downloads, give it some time).
- It seems that disabling/enabling personal web sharing in System Preferences is more reliable to bring up the PPCMC Web Interface after updating it.
- The web interface could be at i.e. 10.0.0.72/ppcmcw (look at what System Preferences says).

Below is PPCMC 7.2.7 BETA 2 Panther build with this functionality:



Another thing related to old IOS, did you know you can take a folder of tons of .IPA application files and make it into a cydia deb repo that can be hosted locally? https://github.com/alex-free/ipa2deb

I have very much considered getting a VPS and hosting an abondonware appstore this way (which may still happen IDK).
 
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