ATV2 Capabilities

Hi all,

I've been tracking the progress of xbmc on iOS (specifically the ATV2) with much interest - I currently have an ATV1, but find it a little buggy.

Simple question, I hope. What are the current abilities of the ATV2 with x264 vids? All of my media is x264 which I understand is accelerated on the ATV2. Does this mean that 1080p content will play smoothly? What about full Bluray rips at 1080p?

I understand that the ATV2 will only output at 720p, but as long as it will play all my media without the need to convert to a lower res I'd be happy!

Great work, btw!

1080p re-encodes with standard AC3 or DTS play fine for me.
Anything with HD audio or full blu-ray rips (.ts) struggle and aren't good enough to watch.

Even tho the Apple TV 2 has hardware h264 acceleration it is still a little underpowered for "full" HD content, after all it is based around the iPad hardware, a 1GHz ARM CPU, 256MB RAM and PowerVR SGX535 GPU, Same GPU as found in iPad, iPhone 3GS and 4, iPod Touch 4th gen plus a ton of other non Apple mobile devices, including Intel's GMA 500 and GMA 600 on board graphics in Netbooks, interesting huh, if you always wondered why graphics performance on the Atom platform sucked... you know now!

The hardware is pretty capable especially for h264 however expect some buffering if the video has high bitrate content.

1080p h264 videos are running fine! Only very high bitrates stutter....