Could someone please point me in the direction of the thread to post a question related to the installation of Linux on Apple TV?:
I have installed Ubuntu hardy on my ATV (really painful process, but goth there in the end!), but the screen resolution is completely wrong (displaying to a wide screen HD tv over components). I see enough so that I can click on menus, but the screen flickering and the "snow" make the screen look like is about to explode, and none of the resolutions available in gnome make it look any better.
I tried updating Nvidia drivers through gnome and I only got a blank screen on restart, so I had to restore xorg.conf through telnet to get it up and runnign again. I am a bit lost as to what to do now?
I have looked through all the posts, searched eveywhere that I know of and have not found an answer yet.
Thanks for any help!
MGA
MGAINUK Wrote:Could someone please point me in the direction of the thread to post a question related to the installation of Linux on Apple TV?:
I have installed Ubuntu hardy on my ATV (really painful process, but goth there in the end!), but the screen resolution is completely wrong (displaying to a wide screen HD tv over components). I see enough so that I can click on menus, but the screen flickering and the "snow" make the screen look like is about to explode, and none of the resolutions available in gnome make it look any better.
I tried updating Nvidia drivers through gnome and I only got a blank screen on restart, so I had to restore xorg.conf through telnet to get it up and runnign again. I am a bit lost as to what to do now?
I have looked through all the posts, searched eveywhere that I know of and have not found an answer yet.
Thanks for any help!
MGA
http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/
Good luck
Check your /var/log/xorg.* log files to see what errors it's throwing or what type of EDID information your TV is attempting to throw out.
Some HDTVs are not what you call "to spec" when it comes to EDID information and you may have to create custom modelines in your xorg.log file that match your TV.
Search this site for nvidia ubuntu and you can probably find further help. The type of problems you're having are not specific to the ATV, but are general to Linux with Nvidia drivers on HDTV's.
EDIT: I just saw you're trying to use component... I have no idea how that works. But I'd doubt any EDID information is sent so you'll almost definitely have to setup modelines.
Try this?
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Component_Out
Warning regarding component: with one of the nvidia beta drivers (can't remember which, might still be true for tne newest versions) my ATV completely froze when forcing component output in xorg.conf. If that happens, try a non-beta or older nvidia driver.
I successfully got the driver built and loaded on karmic using the patch from a few pages back in this thread. I got rev. 25759 compiled on my mac-mini with the crystalhd card installed.
It's playing 1080p trailer downloads beautifully. However when I try to play content recorded off my mythtv system, all HDTV mpeg2, the 1080i content plays with the video squashed into the top half of the screen and the bottom half is all green. 720p content plays, but in both cases frames are being dropped constantly. with messages like this in the log:
Code:
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773703168 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 0
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773830144 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 1
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773830144 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 0
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773703168 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 1
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773957120 DEBUG: DVDVideoCodecCrystalHD: Timeout in CDVDVideoCodecCrystalHD::Decode. ret: 0x00000002 pData: (nil)
any tips?
tube013 Wrote:I successfully got the driver built and loaded on karmic using the patch from a few pages back in this thread. I got rev. 25759 compiled on my mac-mini with the crystalhd card installed.
It's playing 1080p trailer downloads beautifully. However when I try to play content recorded off my mythtv system, all HDTV mpeg2, the 1080i content plays with the video squashed into the top half of the screen and the bottom half is all green. 720p content plays, but in both cases frames are being dropped constantly. with messages like this in the log:
Code:
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773703168 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 0
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773830144 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 1
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773830144 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 0
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773703168 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 1
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773957120 DEBUG: DVDVideoCodecCrystalHD: Timeout in CDVDVideoCodecCrystalHD::Decode. ret: 0x00000002 pData: (nil)
any tips?
Known issue with mpeg2 1080i video content. I'm mentioned many times that handling interlaced content is under construction.
How is your 720p content recorded, I'm also assuming it's mpeg2 720p@60fps, correct ?
Davilla, Clumsy and Dan1son,
Many thanks for your help and suggestions, very much appreciated.
Unfortunately when I got home yesterday I was unable to even start X, not even going back to a previous version of xorg.conf, so I decided to go for a clean install before trying your suggestions. To my frustration, the new install would not go beyond 15% (detecting filesystems) which apparently is a known issue on Linux... After many attempts of trying different things I gave up, and have decided to use a different version of linux tonight (mythbuntu hardy).
This has now become personal. It's the Apple TV or me. This started has a fun thing to do on the Sunday, but it's now consuming all my time (sleeping only 4 hours average). My wife thinks I am crazy with all the shouting I am doing. But I will get linux into the damm thing even if I have to phisically get a penguin into the box.
davilla Wrote:Known issue with mpeg2 1080i video content. I'm mentioned many times that handling interlaced content is under construction.
How is your 720p content recorded, I'm also assuming it's mpeg2 720p@60fps, correct ?
Okay, I thought I had seen something about mpeg2 video, but wasn't sure.
The 720p is also tv recordings (from mythtv) recored with a HD-HR or 1 of 2 pci cards, so your assumption is right, mpeg2 ~720p@60fps*. Signal is unencrypted QAM from verizon fios tv. I ran into an issue with one of my 720p channels with mythfrontend recently, where there was major a/v sync issues. (
http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/7759) I got help on the mythtv list and the patch on the ticket got things back into sync.
I've got a small sample (from the mythtv debugging) up here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2386241/sample.mpg *(mediainfo says this sample is 59.940 fps)
tube013 Wrote:The 720p is also tv recordings (from mythtv) recored with a HD-HR or 1 of 2 pci cards, so your assumption is right, mpeg2 ~720p@60fps*. Signal is unencrypted QAM from verizon fios tv. I ran into an issue with one of my 720p channels with mythfrontend recently, where there was major a/v sync issues. ( http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/7759) I got help on the mythtv list and the patch on the ticket got things back into sync.
ok, I'm also in u.s.a and have both HD-HR and HD-PVR. The HD-HR does not get used much as I'm very far away from the tv towers. The HD-PVR was cranky until I updated it's firmware. The older firmware had an h.264 encoding bug.
Sample snatched and I'll take a look at it.
tube013 Wrote:I successfully got the driver built and loaded on karmic using the patch from a few pages back in this thread. I got rev. 25759 compiled on my mac-mini with the crystalhd card installed.
It's playing 1080p trailer downloads beautifully. However when I try to play content recorded off my mythtv system, all HDTV mpeg2, the 1080i content plays with the video squashed into the top half of the screen and the bottom half is all green. 720p content plays, but in both cases frames are being dropped constantly. with messages like this in the log:
Code:
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773703168 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 0
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773830144 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 1
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773830144 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 0
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773703168 DEBUG: CrystalHD: SetDropState... 1
00:14:52 T:2746219376 M:1773957120 DEBUG: DVDVideoCodecCrystalHD: Timeout in CDVDVideoCodecCrystalHD::Decode. ret: 0x00000002 pData: (nil)
any tips?
Played pretty nicely here. No drops or any CrystalHD warnings or errors, I do see a slight speed up every now and then and the fps is not staying near 60 but pulsing a bit. So might be a XBMC DVDPlayer issue. I'll check that link you mentioned.
YES!
GOT UBUNTU WORKING!
Thanks for the help. As Davilla suggested, TV out through component must be specified in xorg.conf, but I had to get the exact settings from the nvidia driver readme (and even then I had to try a few different combinations).
I have also tried with HDMI and, not only it worked automatically without any tweaking, it looked much sharper. Unfortunately the ATV will ultimately be sitting next to the main TV (Sharp Aquos Titanium, capable of 720p and 1080i) which has no HDMI, only DVI, which is taken, and components.
Anyway, now I need to get the Broadcom card working and compile xbmc. Let's see how many days this takes me.
HAPPY DAYS!
If someone has a 720p h.264 video file that show the 5 reference frame macroblocking pixelation issue, I'd like a sample. Can't seem to find mine
ok, I managed to get pretty far already. I followed the
dingleberry.me guide to installing 8.0.4.
when I get to the final step (compiling xbmc) I run into something which I can't figure out.
it says that I should :
Code:
[i]cd to the crystalhd source and do:[/i]
./bootstrap
./configure
make
make install
I'm not sure what path I should cd to. I tried different paths already such as:
/usr/include/crystalhd
and tried to find some src folders but wasn't lucky enough to find any folder to succesfully start the
./bootstrap command.
by now you surely must have figured out that I have a very limited to non-existing amount of knowledge when it comes to anything regarding command-line linux.
can anyone explain where to go from here?
nerpissad Wrote:ok, I managed to get pretty far already. I followed the dingleberry.me guide to installing 8.0.4.
when I get to the final step (compiling xbmc) I run into something which I can't figure out.
it says that I should :
Code:
[i]cd to the crystalhd source and do:[/i]
./bootstrap
./configure
make
make install
/usr/include/crystalhd
and tried to find some src folders but wasn't lucky enough to find any folder to succesfully start the ./bootstrap command.
by now you surely must have figured out that I have a very limited to non-existing amount of knowledge when it comes to anything regarding command-line linux.
can anyone explain where to go from here?
just type:
cd
cd crystalhd
./bootstrap && ./configure && make && sudo make install