XBMC CrystalHD branch on a USB stick

Thanks to cck197 for this image. I would like to suggest that if you make future images, could you make slightly smaller? Some 4GB thumbdrives are bigger than others. My smallest is 4,005,560,320 Bytes (smaller than the 4,009,754,624 image). I tried truncating the image, but that did not work.

Also thanks to cj43 for the 1080i component instructions. I added the line to the "Device" section of xorg.conf to alleviate any 50/60Hz issues.

has anyone else noticed that the display is shifted to the right and the missing portions are displaed on the left side of the screen? I have tried multple displays and hdmi cables and it still does this. its not specific to the usb installation either, when I ried it before as soon as I installed any nvidia driver it caused problems. the log says the edid contradicts itself.
I also note how long booting on the apple tv takes, is there no other way to work round having to boot two kernels?

Bender222 Wrote:has anyone else noticed that the display is shifted to the right and the missing portions are displaed on the left side of the screen? I have tried multple displays and hdmi cables and it still does this. its not specific to the usb installation either, when I ried it before as soon as I installed any nvidia driver it caused problems. the log says the edid contradicts itself.
I also note how long booting on the apple tv takes, is there no other way to work round having to boot two kernels?

edid display errors seem to be very common. There are fixes for this, google knows.

The dual boot can be bypassed, just build a custom atv-bootloader that embeds the distro kernel/initramfs into atv-bootloader in place of the existing one. It's non-trivial for novices but doable if you understand Linux and it's boot process. At this point, it's a bit premature to be creating fast custom boot distro's when crystalhd branch is still under development. But if someone with experience want's to take this one, I'll point them in the right direction. Notice I say, someone with experience, as I don't have time to teach someone the details.

Geekzilla Wrote:Thanks to cck197 for this image. I would like to suggest that if you make future images, could you make slightly smaller? Some 4GB thumbdrives are bigger than others. My smallest is 4,005,560,320 Bytes (smaller than the 4,009,754,624 image). I tried truncating the image, but that did not work.

Sorry, yes, there's a ton of fat I could've trimmed out there. You've got a complete Ubuntu desktop install complete with OpenOffice & GIMP.

Much kudos to Davilla!!

cck197: great stuff!! Works seamless here.

pin87a Wrote:HDMI audio requires updating ALSA (1.0.21a works) and possibly downgrading the Nvidia driver to 100.14.19 as newer Nvidia drivers break hdmi audio in the ATV.

On another note, it seems that even with that driver combination HDMI audio only works if the TV (or receiver) is connected when the Apple TV boots up.

I'm also looking for HDMI audio. Is the above the only preferred way&workaround at the moment?
*just to be sure before modifying the setup.

Woot..many thanks to Davilla!
..and thanks to cck197 too for the packaging.

Does analog audio output work?

thanks
G75

cck197 Wrote:The internal drive is accessible at /media/pata

You can use scp or rsync to copy files.

If there's call for it I can easily build later revisions of the crystalhd branch and make them available.

I would be interested in a build that I can run directly from a cloned internal hard drive.

After many hours of trying different cloning software I was sucessful in cloning to the hard drive but the hard drive only works via a USB connection. I'm in no way an expert on the ATV or ubunto infact up until the past few days my experence has been limited to hooking up the cables and turn it on so forgive me if I sound like a total noob.

I first tried cloning with acronis true image from the USB stick to the HD and it just got the partitions all wrong. I then used a program called R-drive image and using the raw sector to sector clone was able to get a working image.

I found the responce time a little quicker in menus but launching video and stopping video about the same. As dalvilla noted previously the video launching and video exiting hesitations are being worked on.

I previously mentioned that some videos hung. I have not had the chance to re-test these but will report back mediainfo on these shortly.

My first question would be. Is there software that will allow me to image directly from the .img file so I don't need to bother making a thumb drive image first?

@CCK197

"The internal drive is accessible at /media/pata

You can use scp or rsync to copy files."

As I am a total noob can you expand on this. I breifly spoke to my son who is the ubunto expert in the house and he said that I can work directly from the OS on the ATV itself so I should not need to scp or rsync. I just need to know what files to copy and where to copy them to. Can you give a little more detail on what files I need to copy and where to put them on the internal drive. My son can do the copy directly from terminal on the ATV? Again I apolgize if I sound noobish.

after alot of trouble i got it to work. love it it works well. Some things that could be addressed are:
1. it hangs at audio tab in sstem settings. ( i dont know if this is specific to usb)
2. when booting it hangs right when kexec prints that it has loaded the driver.
3. Is the gnome login manager needed? it loads the tan screen and the cursor appears before xbmc loads.

It is working very well and is a proof that the atv+crystalhd+xbmc is a good combination.

sircube Wrote:I'm also looking for HDMI audio. Is the above the only preferred way&workaround at the moment?
*just to be sure before modifying the setup.

I also ran into the HDMI audio issue and worked round it by plugging in the RCA jacks to my amp. It sounded so much better than HDMI on the OSX version I'd been running previously I settled for it. It could just be that not running everything through the TV is why it sounds better.

dannyv45 Wrote:I would be interested in a build that I can run directly from a cloned internal hard drive.

You'd still need a USB stick with atv-bootloader once to write the image onto the internal disk. Once you'd done that you wouldn't be able to pull the USB and reboot into the Apple TV OS with iTunes and all that jazz.

The over head of booting from USB seems small enough to not warrant worrying about. I'm also surprised at how stable the crystalhd branch is, I've been throwing all sorts at mine over the weekend and I was only forced to reboot once.

dannyv45 Wrote:After many hours of trying different cloning software I was sucessful in cloning to the hard drive but the hard drive only works via a USB connection. I'm in no way an expert on the ATV or ubunto infact up until the past few days my experence has been limited to hooking up the cables and turn it on so forgive me if I sound like a total noob.

Do yourself a favour and get an Ubuntu install. All these fancy disk imaging tools that come with a printed manual and a shiny box do nothing more than dd. If you don't fancy taking the plunge, install Ubuntu inside a VM like VirtualBox or VMWare.

dannyv45 Wrote:As I am a total noob can you expand on this. I breifly spoke to my son who is the ubunto expert in the house and he said that I can work directly from the OS on the ATV itself so I should not need to scp or rsync. I just need to know what files to copy and where to copy them to. Can you give a little more detail on what files I need to copy and where to put them on the internal drive. My son can do the copy directly from terminal on the ATV? Again I apolgize if I sound noobish.

An ssh tutorial is way outside the scope of this forum. As a starting point know that there's an SSH server running on your Apple TV and you can access it with the user xbmc password xbmc: