[samukas]

Hey everyone!

I'm currently using a Boxee Box and a Roku (for online streaming and I use Plex as well), but I am looking more and more into XBMC.
There are many reasons that made me look into XBMC:
- I want to move some of my stuff to a WebDAV server and XBMC supports it;
- I want an automatic way of synching my watched status of movies and tv shows and Trakt Utilities does that;
- There are some cool plugins like LiveStream TV for RMTP streams which I'd definitely use if I had them;
- Beautiful and customizable skins;
- Etc

I'm thinking of buying an AppleTV to try XBMC on it, I was wondering if you guys could enlighten me about some issues. I did read the WiKi and some posts here, but I still have some doubts.


1) Regarding SD support. I pretty much don't have any divx/xvid stuff, it's mostly MPEG2 DVD streams (ripped with MakeMKV, so there original stream is kept intact). Does it plays those nicely? Is it able to perform deinterlace? Does it currently support PGS subtitles from DVDs?

2) Regarding HD support. I realize there's much more to the files than bitrate. I mostly keep my files in spec (in either 3.1 or 4.1), no exagerated ref frames, etc, but I was wondering if there was ever a 'stress-test' to see what kind of bitrates the ATV is able to play?
I have 720p content from 4-8Mbps and some 1080p that goes up to 10 or 12Mbps sometimes.

3) I'm now testing XBMC on my computer with the AEON NOX skin, which provides a great interaction with Trakt.tv. Is this skin fluid on ATV?

4) Are all protocols supported on iOS or are they 'stripped-down' in any way? That is: SMB, NFS, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, HTTP, HTTPS... I've seen some issues related to WebDAV and FTP, but these seem only related to fanart, not the actual playback of files...
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=114122
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=115012

5) Where are the covers and fanart kept? That is, the ATV doesn't have that much flash storage right? Where does it keep all the info and images scrapped?

6) Can you make a copy of your 'profile', settings, preferences, etc... So that if you update firmware on ATV, you can restore XBMC settings?

And some minor questions:

7) How long does the AppleTV takes to boot into XBMC?

8) When you install the 'patch' for it to boot directly into XBMC, even when you press the 'power off' button in XBMC, it won't go into frontrow, right? There's no way for it to boot automatically into XBMC, but still being able to access frontrow, is there...

Hopefully you guys can address some of these questions
If you have anything worth mentioning, let me know!

Cheers!

[Memphiz]

Hey everyone!

1) Regarding SD support. I pretty much don't have any divx/xvid stuff, it's mostly MPEG2 DVD streams (ripped with MakeMKV, so there original stream is kept intact). Does it plays those nicely? Is it able to perform deinterlace?

Non interlaced is good - interlaced is not. At the current version the power isn't enough for doing the deinterlacing in most circumstances.

2) Regarding HD support. I realize there's much more to the files than bitrate. I mostly keep my files in spec (in either 3.1 or 4.1), no exagerated ref frames, etc, but I was wondering if there was ever a 'stress-test' to see what kind of bitrates the ATV is able to play?
I have 720p content from 4-8Mbps and some 1080p that goes up to 10 or 12Mbps sometimes.

Plays avatar 1080p 12mbps - 14mbps without a problem. Just keep the files in spec as you already pointed out ...

4) Are all protocols supported on iOS or are they 'stripped-down' in any way? That is: SMB, NFS, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, HTTP, HTTPS... I've seen some issues related to WebDAV and FTP, but these seem only related to fanart, not the actual playback of files...

All those should work - there is no strip down...

5) Where are the covers and fanart kept? That is, the ATV doesn't have that much flash storage right? Where does it keep all the info and images scrapped?

ATV2 has 8GB local storage where maybe at least 6GB are free. You also can keep your thumbs and fanart on your nas by using path substitution (since you need write access this only works well with nfs, smb and afp)

6) Can you make a copy of your 'profile', settings, preferences, etc... So that if you update firmware on ATV, you can restore XBMC settings?

Yes you can - this should be mentioned in our wiki faq aswell ...

And some minor questions:

7) How long does the AppleTV takes to boot into XBMC?

Depends on your setup (local db or mysql central db) ... something around 5 - 10 secs?

8) When you install the 'patch' for it to boot directly into XBMC, even when you press the 'power off' button in XBMC, it won't go into frontrow, right? There's no way for it to boot automatically into XBMC, but still being able to access frontrow, is there...

Just don't use it - when XBMC crashes on startup (because of corrupted db or so) you have a nice crashloop ... there is no way to get into frontrow with the xbmc-booter installed.

Hopefully you guys can address some of these questions

some of them ...

[samukas]

Non interlaced is good - interlaced is not. At the current version the power isn't enough for doing the deinterlacing in most circumstances.

Hum... is it possible to disable the deinterlacer by default and thus play the frames as they are? Sure I could be seeing the fields, but I mostly play PAL content anyway and they are most of the times speeded up from 24fps and flagged as interlaced just 'because' but really progressive.

Plays avatar 1080p 12mbps - 14mbps without a problem. Just keep the files in spec as you already pointed out ...

Great!

Just don't use it - when XBMC crashes on startup (because of corrupted db or so) you have a nice crashloop ... there is no way to get into frontrow with the xbmc-booter installed.

You bring a good point...

some of them ...

Pretty much all of them... Many thanks for the answers!

Just wondering now if the AEON NOX skin will behave 'nicely' in it... I'm pretty much settled to buying one

[Memphiz]

you can deactivate deinterlacing and make that the default for all videos of course...

[ShadowPeo]

you can deactivate deinterlacing and make that the default for all videos of course...

How, can you point me to some instructions for this one??

Don't Worry found it, I am blind