[VeDaub]

I bought a 40GB Apple TV 1 off of eBay a few weeks ago for 50 bucks, threw in a 320GB Western Digital 7200RPM hard drive I picked up for 75 bucks and I just used the ATV-Patchstick to install XBMC, now that it's all going smooth and I used Cyberduck to throw on a few sample videos and songs to test it out I couldn't help but notice that the videos were very slightly lagging and when I play any audio, I tried three different albums all at different bit rates in .mp3 and they all sound like my speaker is blown. It's just a very slight crackle while technical audio is playing, however when it goes back to simple lyrical acoustic portions of the songs it sounds just fine.

Audio worked fine on this Apple TV when the 40GB hard drive was in there so I don't know if it's the 320GB hard drive or XBMC not working correctly but I did notice that the memory usage is constantly over 85% no matter what I'm doing, even if it's just sitting at the menu screen it's constantly swapping between 85% and 86% usage while the CPU usage is at 0% when nothing it happening.

The Apple TV also seems to be getting much hotter then it used too, is there any way I could possibly boot directly into XBMC and cut out the light OS X install? I think that's what's causing so much memory usage which is probably what is causing the heat issue and the poor bit rate output for audio and video.

I was looking into a linux install to boot directly into XBMC but how much faster is it and how light it is on the resources compared to OS X that comes on it?

[Ned Scott]

As someone who uses an ATV1 as their main HTPC I say this; once you go linux, you don't go back. Grab yourself some Crystalbuntu (wiki), and if you haven't already bought one, get a Broadcom Crystal HD (wiki) card (a must for HD playback, and will take some of the load off of the CPU).

[VeDaub]

I do use Linux as my main media centre I have a HTPC with Ubuntu 11.10 that boots directly into XBMC 11.0 RC2, I just wanted to do it with an Apple TV because it's smaller so it'll fit in my tv stand, it's much quieter, and more energy efficient.

I just didn't know if Linux would make much of a difference as OS X that's on it is extremely stripped down so I figured Linux would be about the same for resources.

I also don't have my house ran for ethernet so I wouldn't have Wifi and my mode of media transfer is over ssh so I need the Wifi built in still. Is there any way to run both? I've been looking and haven't found much.

The audio is still very poor, I tried doing a full restart and it still didn't fix anything.

[Xakor]

You should be able to plug a WiFi USB adapter into it. I'm not sure if you'll have to install any drivers or not, but you should be able to do that and have both WiFi and the Crystal HD card.

[VeDaub]

After I finally got Crystalbuntu working properly on my Apple TV using the Windows GUI installer method it all started working fine except for the wireless not working even after I had manually enabled it like I posted in the other thread. However! The memory usage sits between 32% and 33% so it's a HUGE difference in performance while using Linux over OS X, I don't even see the point in having OS X on this thing with XBMC, just having that installer combo seems like a waste of time since of how much of a resource hog OS X seems to be over Linux.

I am 100% for a Linux install on an Apple TV now, I'm really glad I gave it a shot, thanks for the heads up on Crystalbuntu, after I did the Windows GUI installer it was a walk in the part for install rather then the glitchy OS X USB installer method.