[AppleTV] Apple TV with Crystal HD & XBMC Dharma RC2 crash or stutter during playback

konan Wrote:Now we have CrystalHD and XBMC player is presumably much more efficient compared to earlier versions and we have even more problems. What does that tell you? Buggy code, not well tested, not fixed. I can not prove it since I have no skills developing and debugging on ATV platform but believe me I can smell the buggy code very well.

What I am trying to tell is that there is no proper testing of XBMC on certain platforms, in particular I can see that the ATV platforms suffers a lot from it.

Don't you just hate it when free open source software is not tested properly and does not work every time with the myriad of codec combinations out there for media playback. Especially on a box that is not even manufactured any more.

None of what you wrote above was helpful or indeed relevant to your issue. "I have no skills but......" It also seems you also have no manners or appreciation for others hard work

Tolax

Tolax

tolax Wrote:Don't you just hate it when free open source software is not tested properly and does not work every time with the myriad of codec combinations out there for media playback. Especially on a box that is not even manufactured any more.

None of what you wrote above was helpful or indeed relevant to your issue. "I have no skills but......" It also seems you also have no manners or appreciation for others hard work

Tolax

Tolax

Agreed.

@konan, your attitude sucks.

If I were Davilla, I would not be inclined to help unless you are polite, post a full debug log on pastebin, answer all questions with the requested information as quickly as possible, and thank him profusely for all the work he's done.

-Wes

konan Wrote:Here is the thing. You don't need CrystalHD to play 720p video on AppleTV. Its standard video + CPU is capable of playing 720p just fine. I can tell because I used to run XBMC on ATV long before CrystalHD was available.

Now we have CrystalHD and XBMC player is presumably much more efficient compared to earlier versions and we have even more problems. What does that tell you? Buggy code, not well tested, not fixed.

I have only ever used 720p on a variety of players. My ATV-1G could only play 720p that was main profile. I don't know how you managed to play 720p video without some kind of converting beforehand.

I or one of our cats accidentally restored the ATV to its factory 2.3 settings and I had to reinstall everything. I have yet to upgrade to RC2, but RC1 plays great. This is using OSX. Maybe after a few days it will use more memory but for now the free memory is quite high. Will move to rc2 in a day or two.

philip

The ATV plays fine 720p up to MP@3.1 and of course all itunes HD rentals
If you need any high profile h264 feature you can try setting skiploopfilter very high but the playback is jerky at best
With crystal you can easily play 720p HP@4.1 which is typical of downscaled BD rips
As I said if you set the ATV resolution to 720p and NOT 1080p XBMC with Crystal plays 720p BD rips just fine
I advice to disable all video postprocessing and sync options and set the renderer to ARB and upscaling to bilinear

interceptor121 Wrote:The ATV plays fine 720p up to MP@3.1 and of course all itunes HD rentals
If you need any high profile h264 feature you can try setting skiploopfilter very high but the playback is jerky at best
With crystal you can easily play 720p HP@4.1 which is typical of downscaled BD rips
As I said if you set the ATV resolution to 720p and NOT 1080p XBMC with Crystal plays 720p BD rips just fine
I advice to disable all video postprocessing and sync options and set the renderer to ARB and upscaling to bilinear

I have always kept mine at 720p. I haven't tried the renderer set to ARB but just left it at automatic. Will try it. Has it made a difference in your case?

My ATV-1G has played 720p fine from iTunes, from converting with the Turbo h.264 HD ElGato card and so on. As long as you stay within the bounds set by the specs it's great. On the other hand my ATV-2G can far surpass those. Mind you the ATV-1G has other advantages.

What would be nice would be a way to dual boot OSX-ATV and Linux-ATV from the remote. I use Airtunes a lot so moving to Linux-ATV as the only OS is not for me.

Do you think component connections are easier for the Crystal HD card to handle?

philip

davilla Wrote:crashed in postproc-51-x86-osx.so, do you have an upscaler turned on ?

tested some deinterlacers, but then i removed that, still crashes...

interceptor121 Wrote:Konan: what is your resolution set on the ATV? I found out that if you set it to 1080p the XBMC playback stutters but at 720p it plays much better let alone the picture quality also better in my case because of a higher quality upscaler in the TV
If you have your ATV at 1080p set it back to 720p and things will improve massively

It's been known for quite a while that on ATV running Apple OS the output resolution should be set to 720p instead of 1080p. I do have it set to 720p and I still experience playback stuttering.

I have two ATV with almost identical configurations and one of them performs a bit better than another using RC2 and r174 but the difference is only in how much stuttering there is. I was not able to get rid of stuttering completely. Since some people report that they have no issues playing HD content on ATV with RC2 + r174 I am going to completely reinstall one of my ATV and see if a new clean install makes it performing better with RC2 and r174.

Yesterday I stumbled upon another phenomenon with RC2 and r174. One of the 720p movies (A Christmas Carol to be exact) H.264 encoded with DTS sound shows a lot of pixel artifacts during the playback. I've only noticed that yesterday because I've only watched it before on my windows machine that does not have such a problem. The issue is 100% reproducible and I am going to post log and MediaInfo soon.

To be honest I am starting to think of getting rid of my ATVs since I don't see much progress of HD playback on ATV platform. Since the March 2010 release it almost has not been any progress in terms of how well the ATV is able to play HD content. If nothing can be done to improve on this problem I just don't see the point to hang with the ATV since the cost of the low power Intel + ION compact platforms has gone down and XBMC for Windows works just fine.

konan Wrote:Yesterday I stumbled upon another phenomenon with RC2 and r174. One of the 720p movies (A Christmas Carol to be exact) H.264 encoded with DTS sound shows a lot of pixel artifacts during the playback. I've only noticed that yesterday because I've only watched it before on my windows machine that does not have such a problem. The issue is 100% reproducible and I am going to post log and MediaInfo soon.

Some h264 content will pixilate under a bcm70012 card. The decoder can't quite handle the h264 flavor being used. There's nothing that can be done to improve this except to get a bcm70015 card.

waldo22 Wrote:@konan, your attitude sucks.

If I were Davilla, I would not be inclined to help unless you are polite, post a full debug log on pastebin, answer all questions with the requested information as quickly as possible, and thank him profusely for all the work he's done.

My attitude only reflects the current state of the product that I really like and really sad to see not improving.

One of my goals of writing such "bad tempered" posts was to draw public attention to the issues and I am glad that I've finally achieved that at list partially. I do appreciate all the work that XBMC team is doing especially Scott Davilla since he seems to be the only person who actually works on improving the XBMC on ATV platform. Unfortunately I don't see much of the the progress here since the March 2010 release. Correct me if I am wrong regarding the progress.

I am myself a professional software developer with over 20 years of experience and I know exactly what is the difference between willing to write the good software and actually delivering it. At certain point a good developer should acknowledge problems if they exist and inform their audience about future plans for mitigating them. If there is no open communication there will be only bad attitude when users experience unresolvable problems.

I am willing to help but since I don't posses required development skills (I develop on Microsoft .NET mostly for web) I only see myself being useful in testing department and this is exactly how I am trying to help: test as much as possible and report all found problems hoping that those reports will help to improve the software. However when the reports are simply being ignored then what else I can do?

If you guys with "good attitude" know the better recipe for helping developers to improve the software then just share it instead of trying to teach other people "manners". Being "polite" is not a synonym of being "useful". Sometimes truth must be told openly.

davilla Wrote:Some h264 content will pixilate under a bcm70012 card. The decoder can't quite handle the h264 flavor being used. There's nothing that can be done to improve this except to get a bcm70015 card.

Thanks for the response. Are you saying that there is no point of posting the log and media info? Correct me if I am wrong but based on my understanding of the difference between 012 and 015 is in supported video formats:

BCM70012
========
H.264/AVC HP at L4.1 1080i/1080p, 40 Mb/sec.
H.264/AVC HP at L3.0 480i/480p
H.264/AVC HP at L3.2 720p
SMPTE VC-1 AP at L3 1080i/1080p, 40 Mb/sec.
WMV9 (VC-1 SP and MP)
MPEG-2 MP at ML
MPEG-2 MP at HL

BCM70015
========
H.264/AVC HP @ L4.2 1080p60, 40 Mb/sec.
VC-1 Advanced Profile @ L3.0, 45 Mb/sec.
SMPTE VC-1 AP @ L3, 45 Mb/sec.
WMV9 (VC-1 SP @ ML and MP @ HL)
MPEG-4 Part-2 SP and ASP 1080p30
MPEG-2 MP @ HL, LL, and ML, 80 Mb/sec.
DivX® 3.11, 4.1, 5.X, 6.X, XviD

Based on that here is the question: if the media info shows that the profile does not exceed BCM70012 limits should not the media play correctly?