2010-06-06, 19:47
voip-ninja Wrote:Can anyone else comment about playback performance of uncompressed 1080P .mkv content. Someone earlier posted that it could not handle the 3-4MB/s data rate of Star Trek MKV without stuttering.
I'm really on the fence between this and an Acer Aspire Revo (or maybe Zotac Mag). I have about 150 BD rips which are all created with mkvmerge and are all original uncompressed video and audio.
I think you read me wrongly then. XBMC on the original ATV OS (with Frontrow and all that gubbins running) will not play my Star Trek BD-rip .mkv smoothly. The sound comes out fine, but the video descends into a slideshow because it swaps so much.
XBMC on this Ubuntu image works great on the same file. There were two moments where it appeared to stutter very briefly, but beyond that it was silky. I'm satisfied that it can handle it. I've added a swap partition to the internal drive, and we'll see if that makes life better when it can swap out unnecessary applications and make space for bigger buffers.
As for the Nvidia ION platform, I've played with XBMC Live on a dual-core Atom/ION machine (on a Zotac board), with 2GB of RAM, and it works perfectly. If you must have a machine that just *works*, must have it *today*, are prepared to put in the mucking about to get the remote working, and are happy to spend the extra cash, then it's an excellent platform. If the ATV doesn't work out for me, that's exactly what I'm going to do. If you already have an ATV, grab a CrystalHD card and have a play - no great loss if you don't find it overwhelming.
Bear in mind the following:
1) This is not exactly an optimised installation of Ubuntu (and Sam has never claimed that it is). It could likely be made a lot smaller, and perhaps a little quicker, if it were stripped down a bit. It's a convenient image for those of us who don't have the time or can't be bothered.
2) This is a development version of XBMC. I expect that once they get the release version out it'll have some of the kinks ironed out, and may have these couple of stutters sorted.
3) The CrystalHD support is still *very* new, and appears to need a little work. Again it's a work-in-progress, so we can't expect it to be 100% today.
In other words, I expect that the few flaws with this release will be tidied up given a little time.