Windows 7 w/ tuner for Backend - AppleTV 2 5.1 & XBMC front end. Live tv possible?

XBMC does not run on iOS 5.1 yet. There's threads in the iOS support section about it. They're working on it.

Kafluke, what skippy means is much of the Live TV streaming in is in MPEG2. The hardware decoder on ATV2 is specifically H.264, an MPEG4 variant. It will not accelerate MPEG2 at all.

I have TVHeadend+XBMC running an HDHomeRun w/ QAM. I can watch the SD TV stations live, but I cannot watch any of the HD stations on my ATV2. the processing power required is too much for just cpu.

No ETA on when XBMC will support iOS 5.1.

What are you talking about? Of course XBMC runs on iOS 5.1. I have appletv ver 5.0 (iOS 5.1) on my atv2 and I'm running XBMC right now. Do you want a video to prove it? I think you must be talking about iOS 5.1 running on ATV3 (1080p version).

I've read entire threads where people are running HD through ATV2 using a HDHomeRun watching HD just fine. I am just looking for a windows based solution for a backend since I already have an internal PCI-E HD TV tuner and didn't want to have to purchase an external HDHomeRun.

I don't really want to resurrect such an old thread, but this kept coming up when doing my research to get live tv on the apple tv 2, and IMHO so far the best solution I have found (for a windows 7 backend) is using media portal, plus the TheChiefs ATV2 pvr (builds can be found here: http://xbmc.picmania.org/)

His builds contain PVR addons for ForTheRecord, MediaPortal, MythTV, TVheadend, VDR VNSI, VDR XVDR and VU+, so if you use a different backend it "should" work with them as well.


I have pretty much the same issues as most have reported SD works just fine HD buffers and stutters. I am using a dual hdhomerun, a hdhomerun prime, some old K world card I have had for ages atsc/clear qam/ntsc (software based mpeg2) and a ati 650 pcie atsc/ntsc card (software based mpeg2). I do not get any encrypted channels from my hdhomerun prime (despite having a cable card in it and activated, WMC does get all the channels), but despite this limitation i actually find this to be pretty stable, the only real problem i have run across is the timeline view for the EPG crashes ATV2 back to main menu. I have checked the logs but do not see any errors when this happens basically the last entry states changing epg view to 16 (or some other number not for sure off the top of my head) but I am assuming that it is prolly due to the size of my epg and how many channels have to load, pvr builds for windows do not show the same behavior.

I also would like to give a big shout out to MARGRO his posts on these forums and at http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg/xbmc/ were by far the most useful in getting my setup going.