Best Practices Codecs/Resolutions AppleTV
#1
First of all I'd like to thank all the guys, who put so much effort into XBMC - Your work IS appreciated!!!

I do use XBMC since a few years on my good old modded Xbox.

The main reasons:

- Slick and sexy GUI
- No Codec hassle
- Plugins
- Open

You can belive me I went through many of the commercial boxes, such as ShowCenter, Rhapsody N-35, Kiss (Linksys) ...

And not a single one came even close to the XBM functionality and look & feal, mainly due to the limitations of frequently used SigmaDesign chip - compared to open software. Lots of codec nightmars, not being able to fast forward just to mention some issues.

I like Apple hardware, but I never considered ATV as a reasonable option, becasue of the recuirements of transcoding all stuff.
(My VCR is a MythTV PC with 2 x PVR 350, which create "standard" MPEG2 files)

Obviosely there are drawbacks of the Xbox:

- LOUD
- No Remote Power on
- CPU Limitation

So the combination of XBMC and ATV makes just sense for my...even if the ATV also is not the fastes device on earth, but what I understood 720p is fine.

After installing XBMC on my brand new AppleTV box, I went through several stages of - cool - ok - this sucks Confused

Video glitches are my main concern, I found these with my 10MBit MPEG2 720x576 recordings on fast camera movements. The overall picture quality was good though, but considering my 2002 XBOX could cope with that and not even HQ upscaling was used.

Having all this said - I assume much of the video quality issues can be optimized with useing the right settings.

Would it make sensde to create a best practices documents on:

- What's the best Resolution for XBMC on ATV
- (1080 didn't worked for me - looked windowed...)
- What's the best Resolution for non HD video sources
- 720x576, 640x480, ??
- What's the best codec to be used (belive XBMC leverages memcoder, which may prefere some codes?!?)
- Xvid, MPEG, mp4, h.264
- Profiles, bandwith?

How much code optimization in regards to video performance can we expect with the current ATV hardware, considering the actual version is beta?

Lot's of questions, big expectations *gg*
I'm willing ot add value to this community with testing and publishing results - Don't let me write code, I can bat it's terrible ;-)

Keep up the good work and let XBMC win all the OpenSource prices - You got all my votes!

Cheers, netwho
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#2
Check out the AppleTV settings in Handbrake. http://handbrake.fr/
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#3
Thanks for the info. I used Handbrake allready for the iPod Video.
Just processed a few movies and I have to say the output is great.

However, I still see occasionally some vertical flickers e.g. when the camera moves fast or zooms...

I'll verify that when playing theses films directly with the ATV software.
It's deuntely not a setup issue, at least when I'm watching HQ trailers on the original ATV software.

Cheers, netwho
PS. Network shoudl be fine, I'm useing SMB vrom a NAS which I get read perfomance of about 40-50MBytes / sec.
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#4
netwho Wrote:Thanks for the info. I used Handbrake allready for the iPod Video.
Just processed a few movies and I have to say the output is great.

However, I still see occasionally some vertical flickers e.g. when the camera moves fast or zooms...

I'll verify that when playing theses films directly with the ATV software.
It's deuntely not a setup issue, at least when I'm watching HQ trailers on the original ATV software.

Cheers, netwho
PS. Network shoudl be fine, I'm useing SMB vrom a NAS which I get read perfomance of about 40-50MBytes / sec.

Turn off vertical sync to fix the flickers.
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#5
I'll check, but I belive I turned everything off I could already... Additionally I found also, that the AC-3 decoder XBMC uses seams to be not as good as the one for the origina ATV software....

I'll keep tuning - because the goal is finally to go 100% XBMC with my ATV....
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#6
very nice. i will try this ipod video setting too. but i already got Xvid avi movies and they run fantastically.
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