2009-12-11, 01:36
Hey my topic title rhymes!
Anyhoo, I was researching this forum because I saw some very cheap AppleTV's on craigslist. Thought I'd looksee here to see if the aTV is worth it. I'm currently running XBMC on an original Xbox.
Searching this forum, it seems like the aTV is not much of an improvement over the Xbox! Considering the aTV hardware is about 5-7 years younger, that's surprising.
Anyway, I just thought I'd point some of you aTV users to the XBMC on Xbox forum discussions about 720p mkv playback.
If we can get beautiful 720p HD mkv files playing smoothly on an Xbox, you should be able to do the same for aTV. Do a search over there. The key is to encode your rips using XviD or preferably, DivX. Both XviD and DivX are much easier for the CPU to decode, and with high enough bitrates are just as good as the x.264 720p rips from "the usual places." H.264 is great for reducing file size while maintaining quality, but if you can spare some disc space (and at less than a dime per gigabyte who can't?) XviD/DivX encodes look just as good (just take up a bit more space).
Some people are lazy, don't want to re-encode their scene rips. Once you do it a few times and get the process down, it's easy to setup and have 2 or three re-encodes go over night (or in the case of my paleo-PC 1 per night). If you are making your own rips from your own BR discs, then just switch to DivX or XviD instead of x264 and you should be golden. Search the xbmc for xbox support forums for threads detailing the custom settings. aTV should be able to handle even slightly better settings since it's processor is ~30% faster.
Good luck...
Edit: Ha! That was my 200th post!
Anyhoo, I was researching this forum because I saw some very cheap AppleTV's on craigslist. Thought I'd looksee here to see if the aTV is worth it. I'm currently running XBMC on an original Xbox.
Searching this forum, it seems like the aTV is not much of an improvement over the Xbox! Considering the aTV hardware is about 5-7 years younger, that's surprising.
Anyway, I just thought I'd point some of you aTV users to the XBMC on Xbox forum discussions about 720p mkv playback.
If we can get beautiful 720p HD mkv files playing smoothly on an Xbox, you should be able to do the same for aTV. Do a search over there. The key is to encode your rips using XviD or preferably, DivX. Both XviD and DivX are much easier for the CPU to decode, and with high enough bitrates are just as good as the x.264 720p rips from "the usual places." H.264 is great for reducing file size while maintaining quality, but if you can spare some disc space (and at less than a dime per gigabyte who can't?) XviD/DivX encodes look just as good (just take up a bit more space).
Some people are lazy, don't want to re-encode their scene rips. Once you do it a few times and get the process down, it's easy to setup and have 2 or three re-encodes go over night (or in the case of my paleo-PC 1 per night). If you are making your own rips from your own BR discs, then just switch to DivX or XviD instead of x264 and you should be golden. Search the xbmc for xbox support forums for threads detailing the custom settings. aTV should be able to handle even slightly better settings since it's processor is ~30% faster.
Good luck...
Edit: Ha! That was my 200th post!