[AppleTV1] XBMC slow?
#1
Hi

I have a ATV1, with a Crystal HD card.
And now running Sams Crystal Ubuntu on a USB stick.

Everything works fine, but I think it`s slow.

For instance when watching a Youtube clip, and trying to do another search while playing, it almost seems to hang.

Is XBMC to much for ATV1?
Will it be much faster on ATV2, or is a HTPC the only way to go?
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#2
Yeah the ATV1 is quite underpowered... but with Sams image and a CrystalHD card it's quite usable. Certain things are just too hard for it, like doing something while a video runs in the background. We just don't expect that to work and always press stop when we want to go back to the menus on the ATV1.

To be honest, the ATV1 running Sams image is better than an ATV2 running XBMC. The ATV2 scrapes slowly, is useless while it's updating or scraping in the background, the menus are slower/less responsive than the ATV1, only outputs 720p, etc. It does work, and my wife uses it every night when feeding our infant, but it's less than ideal as a main unit.

HTPCs are definitely still the way to go. Even a fairly inexpensive ION 2 box or something similar will work much better than either ATV... still 3x the price though.

My Revo is hooked up to our main TV, the ATV1 is in our master bedroom, and the ATV2 is hooked up to our floating TV which is currently in the infants room. That's the order I put them. They all do work though and are impressive in and of themselves, but the HTPC is considerably better, especially if you want to run a fancier skin.
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#3
Ok, thank you for quick reply.

Going to do the same thing as you then.
PC in the living room, and ATV1 in the bed room Smile
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#4
It's probably the USB access making it appear to be slow
I have ATV1's running with UBUNTU on the hard drive (bye bye Mac OS) and these run like water. Especially with the Broadcom Crystal HD card installed.

Each ATV1 was purchased between $45-$70 and $35 for each Broadcom card
*Say ~$90 each
With the remotes and everything ready to go, it's worth it.

I got an ATV1 running as a server running MYSQL and NFS exports for file sharing

I have an ATV2, and it is noticeably slower on screen refreshes, and starting plugins like icefilms. I have to use a light weigh on it, the ATV1's are using Transparency skin without a problem.
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#5
Ok, thanks.

Will try to put the image on the internal HDD before discarding the ATV1 Smile
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#6
Yeah I'd definitely not use a USB drive for Crystalbuntu. It really slows down the boxes ability to load fanart/posters/info when scanning through media, starting up in general, and even loading new views for the skin. I doubt you'll notice much of a difference with that specific searching youtube while playing problem you saw though.
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#7
I love XBMC on the ATV2, but I have to say that right now an ATV1 + BCDH + Sam's image, has become my main HTPC. Also, try enabling dirty regions (might still have some visual bugs, but that should go away once Eden is released): http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Dirty_regions

DR will greatly speed up the GUI on both the ATV1 and the ATV2 (or any XBMC platform).

I imagine that the ATV2 will get even more great features (both official and jailbroken) as time goes on, and it has Netflix which the ATV1 doesn't have, but don't count your ATV1 out just yet.
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#8
Superdust
I have some notes on setting up Ubuntu on ATV1 if you truly want to get rid of Mac OS and dedicate this ATV to ubuntu
*it is a night and day difference

Send me a PM and I'll get it for you if you want
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#9
Thanks atari800, setup tis would be great!

Any chance you can post the setup here?
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#10
I would also note there is a version of openelec for ATV1 that I was thinking about trying. Open elec is so slim an os if all you want is XBMC, its great on my Ion 330 boxes. But have not tried it yet on ATV1.
Acer Revo 3610 w/ Ubuntu 10.10, Giada Cube Win 7, 2 ATV 1's one w Crystal HD card, UnRaid server w/ SAB/SickBeard/Couch Potato/Transmission, MacBook Pro, Hackintosh Dell Mini 10v
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#11
It's really hard to beat how easy Sam's image/method is, and it's very fast/efficient.
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#12
Sams image is fantastic - agreed
Some of us like to get our hands dirty and set it up ourselves

Ill find my notes, clean them up and post

I'll post in the Linux/Live section
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#13
Sounds great, thank you!
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[AppleTV1] XBMC slow?0