Thursday, March 8, 2018

PPC Media Center Battles TLS Apocalypse

You may have read about the "TLS Apocalypse" hitting PowerPC Macs as a web browser/TenFourFox complication, but another thing it affects is youtube-dl, PPC Media Center's backend. You can no longer update youtube-dl with Tiger's old OpenSSL version (hence PPC Media Center's auto-update fails as well), so you have to manually download youtube-dl's binary from their website and move it to /usr/local/bin. That is until PPCMC's Adam Albrec recently released an updater app to do it all for you.

Called PPCMC Updater (download page here), it updates youtube-dl in the background and can also tie into iCal and have it call for an update check every couple of weeks. It also has a rollback feature in case you download a new version that's completely broken and you need to recover the old one. The app is actually a TenFourFoxBox, so it requires TenFourFox on your system.

Also, Adam is attempting to compile a new version of OpenSSL that actually works and can save us from the ultimate apocalypse when the Youtubes and Vimeos start requiring TLS 1.2, not just Github and SourceForge. So if you have any pointers, this Macintosh Garden thread might be the best place to drop a word.