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Hey my topic title rhymes! Big Grin

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! Big Grin
AppleTV can already do 720p, what do you think the HD rentals are? Screw 720p...I'm anxiously waiting for 1080p on the ATV! Big Grin
Of course aTV can play 720p vids stock. The question is can it do it with XBMC (which may not use the GPU as well as the stock OS/X implementation does).

My searches in this forum turned up several threads where people were having trouble playing 720p h/x.264 mkv files on their aTV using XBMC.
sion28 Wrote:Of course aTV can play 720p vids stock. The question is can it do it with XBMC (which may not use the GPU as well as the stock OS/X implementation does).

My searches in this forum turned up several threads where people were having trouble playing 720p h/x.264 mkv files on their aTV using XBMC.

Those testing builds from svn trunk should turn on pbo's (settings -> video -> playback) , you will gain back 10-20 percent CPU.
tuckbodi Wrote:AppleTV can already do 720p, what do you think the HD rentals are? Screw 720p...I'm anxiously waiting for 1080p on the ATV! Big Grin

But it can only play certain 720p files. Moreover .mkv video seems all over the map. You've got crazy encoding ( > main profile) which you can never tell what will play on the ATV. 1080p is nice but I doubt that most people could tell the difference on current popular HDTV's. Depends on size, distance, type of video, etc... Unfortunately that means there is no real incentive for Apple to upgrade the ATV (except that I suppose IDE, older nvidia graphics, etc....are actually more expensive than newer stuff).



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