[gibsonlp]

Hi guys.
I've been using xbmc on my media center for quite a while.
My young brother's wife want to surprise him with a streamer for his birthday, she wanted to buy a junk her friend recommended and I stepped in and told her to hold on.

To make a long story short: I didn't understand exactly how xbmc running on apple-tv, I understand that vpdau isn't supported on the nvidia 7300 gpu there so it means - cpu decoding (and therefore - no 1080p h264 support on the 1ghz cpu...)

My questions are:

1. Is installing xbmc on apple TV a matter of simple software configuration and installation or do I need to make any hardware modifications?
2. Is xbmc capable of playing everything up to 720p h264 streams (and including...)?
3. Are there any limitation on remote mounts, external drive, etc...?
4. Does the remote work with xbmc?

Basically - can I just buy my brother an apple-tv knowing it will work fine with everything he throws at it? (his TV is only 720p so nothing more than that, obviously).

Thanks!

[fredaroony]

Do a search. Asked a million times

[garyi]

In my experience it struggles with 720 unless you use some mysterious settings for their encoding of the 720 which no one seems inclined to discuss, as you have discovered.

[TeknoJnky]

1. Is installing xbmc on apple TV a matter of simple software configuration and installation or do I need to make any hardware modifications?

yes its just simple software hack, no hardware modifcatio needed, see the wiki for how to install xbmc for appletv

2. Is xbmc capable of playing everything up to 720p h264 streams (and including...)?

see garyi response

3. Are there any limitation on remote mounts, external drive, etc...?

adding sources works exactly the same as other xbmc

4. Does the remote work with xbmc?

yes, but understand it has a limited number of buttons and thus only basic functionality

Basically - can I just buy my brother an apple-tv knowing it will work fine with everything he throws at it? (his TV is only 720p so nothing more than that, obviously).

not exactly, it will work with anything 420p of course, but 720 is hit or miss.

[Scott R]

If you're willing to spending AppleTV money, and really want XBMC, another box to consider is the Acer AspireRevo. You can get one for $200 from NewEgg or Best Buy, plus another $25 for a USB IR receiver/remote from eBay. It will play 1080p high-bitrate Blu-ray rips. I couldn't get XBMC Live or XBMC for Linux to pass 5.1 over HDMI and playback wasn't perfectly smooth, but XBMC for Windows coupled with MPC-HC as an external player solves both of those problems.

[gibsonlp]

Thanks for all the answer guys.
I thought about getting an ion based nettop and just install linux on it, I might be inclined to do so.

Thanks again.

[UnisonRuss]

I just tested some 720P files, and they all played great! No visible stutter

[WAdam]

I was in your exact situation a year ago and after struggling for weeks/months and coming close to giving up I found the sweet spot for converting and playing 720p video.

I will make the side note that at the time, I had read something about the core appleTV video playback being more powerful than what XBMC uses so I have grown more comfortable using "iTunes" than XBMC for HD content. However, once or twice I have sampled the same videos and XBMC did handle it as well. This performance difference may be fact or myth. On to the settings.

To convert (mainly 720p mkv files) I am using the freeware EncodeHD http://dcunningham.net/encodehd/

I have used the preset for AppleTV and it works fine but I use the Advanced Flags: (no quotes)

"-b 4000k -bufsize 1835k -s hd720 -qscale 1 -flags +4mv+aic -trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 300"

There was a time when I could tell you specifically what this does but for now, it just works. Today it converted a 6.8 gig 720p Terminator down to 3.5 and plays on AppleTV without stutter. This process takes roughly 90-120 min.

There's my story, maybe someone can elaborate on this or offer up modifications. I'd be happy to hear of a better way.