[Chianti]

Both devices are roughly the same size, yet my apple tv 2 simply cannot handle streaming my media (mostly 1080p mkv movies). It's constantly buffering and makes it unwatchable. The WDTV Live Plus, on the other hand, streams even the highest bitrate encoded files with ease.

I love XBMC... Id do anything to replace the horrible generic interface on the wdtv. I'm even willing to donate upwards of several thousands of dollars to get it ported to the WDTV Live Plus. Can someone explain why this hasn't happened yet? Or why the atv2 is so loaded down by the same files my WDTV can play without a blip? Until then, as horrible as the interface may be, WDTV is my only option.

[DLeavy]

Have you tried posting your issues in the iOS support forum? I don't see any posts from you in there, so you might be able to get your ATV2 working - it's a work in progress and a lot of people have success with it. Granted, it has to software decode certain formats and is not powerful enought to do it for some HD files, but H.264 encoded files are hardware accelerated and it can play them.

[Chianti]

Have you tried posting your issues in the iOS support forum? I don't see any posts from you in there, so you might be able to get your ATV2 working - it's a work in progress and a lot of people have success with it. Granted, it has to software decode certain formats and is not powerful enought to do it for some HD files, but H.264 encoded files are hardware accelerated and it can play them.

I'll give that a try. Thanks!

[ibixat]

I'll give that a try. Thanks!

for a few thousand dollars... it would be in your best interested to just build an appliance-like xbmc HTPC that can put both of those devices to shame... or for 400-600 bucks really. I believe the wdtv is one of the non-starters due to the hardware it uses. I hate to take away potentially a couple grand for the dev team but you'd be better off donating a bit of cash and making yourself a small htpc to handle the duties you're looking for.

[BASARAB]

are you running latest nightly builds? my files play smoothly

[Chianti]

for a few thousand dollars... it would be in your best interested to just build an appliance-like xbmc HTPC that can put both of those devices to shame... or for 400-600 bucks really. I believe the wdtv is one of the non-starters due to the hardware it uses. I hate to take away potentially a couple grand for the dev team but you'd be better off donating a bit of cash and making yourself a small htpc to handle the duties you're looking for.

I'm offering the bounty, so to speak, because I've been setting up media centers at friends/family houses. While I dropped the money on building a kick-ass HTPC, most of them aren't willing to drop that kind of money

[voochi]

Get an Atom/Ion nettop and install OpenElec onto it. There is plenty to choose from - Zotac, Foxconn, etc

That's the closest thing to a user-friendly XBMC box at the moment. Certainly as user-friendly as a hacked ATV2.

[RockerC]

I love XBMC... Id do anything to replace the horrible generic interface on the wdtv. I'm even willing to donate upwards of several thousands of dollars to get it ported to the WDTV Live Plus. Can someone explain why this hasn't happened yet? Or why the atv2 is so loaded down by the same files my WDTV can play without a blip? Until then, as horrible as the interface may be, WDTV is my only option.

WDTV chipset does not support hardware 3D acceleration, it only have hardware 2D acceleration.

XBMC requires hardware 3D acceleration so it could not run smoothly enough on today's WDTV hardware.

Reason for that is better explained in these threads

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=112159

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=40236

[Ned Scott]

Maybe it's because XBMC for ATV2 is in development and not a finished product? Because you are using a 4 month old copy of XBMC that is very outdated?

In any case, I'm having zero issues right now with my ATV2 and XBMC (outside of some Dirty Regions GUI stuff that's being hammered out as we speak).