2014-04-17, 20:37
My comments on XBMC on FIRE TV
Putting XBMC on a AFTV couldn't have been easier. Just followed the steps and was off to the races.
I put the gotham build on first. Keep in mind my config us pretty simple. I just want XBMC to serve up my movie collection on my NAS. I turn off Music, Pictures, Programs & Weather and when I'm done configuring I turn off Video so I just have Movies, TV Shows and Settings on the menu. I don't do any kind of fancy audio, just HDMI to the TV. I may expand this in the future but for now it's very simple. The only add-on I put in is the Universal Movie Scraper. I do let XBMC add You-Tube so it can play trailers, but again, very simple.
I have a lot of junk video's. Lots of low bitrate stuff, all manner of formats both audio and video and even a few HD videos, but not tons. I've always used a particular movie in my collection as my reference for testing XBMC builds as it's particularly crappy. I look for studders. My Samsung Smart TV plays this movie (streaming through smarthub) about as good as I could ever imagine). Smooth, no studdters or pauses. The smarthub app seems to make all my movies look better but has a lousy Gui which is nothing more than a crude file manager. So I use this as my comparison. My GBox midnight plays this video with all kinds of studders. Tried different firmware, different XBMC Builds etc no improvement. Not a buffering issue but a playback issue. Even moved the movie onto the box itself with no improvement. My RPi played the movie with slightly less studdering and when I turned on De-interlace it played it almost as good as the samsung TV. This became my new reference point for XBMC. Unfortunatly while I love the price of the RPi and the fun I had tinkering around with it, the GUI is slow. Now I've got a Fire and love the speed of the GUI. Nice and zippy. When I try and play my reference movie, it does have studder (Gotham). I can't turn on de-interlace because I believe that function is disabled because we have to use libstragefreight instead of mediacodec
When I allowed mediacodel and turned on deinterlace I got lots of slow mo playback.
So I just installed the SP Frodo build and will configure and try that. To be honest the way I use XBMC I could live using FRODO.
I'm enjoying this box so far. Still have tinkering to do, but like it's speed. Oh, and there is the whole Amazon side as well.
Roveer
I was so surprised when I loaded the SP Frodo build and didn't get an XBMC icon or splash screen. What is the SP Build and how does it get to be called something other than XBMC? I'm guessing it's an experimental build?
Putting XBMC on a AFTV couldn't have been easier. Just followed the steps and was off to the races.
I put the gotham build on first. Keep in mind my config us pretty simple. I just want XBMC to serve up my movie collection on my NAS. I turn off Music, Pictures, Programs & Weather and when I'm done configuring I turn off Video so I just have Movies, TV Shows and Settings on the menu. I don't do any kind of fancy audio, just HDMI to the TV. I may expand this in the future but for now it's very simple. The only add-on I put in is the Universal Movie Scraper. I do let XBMC add You-Tube so it can play trailers, but again, very simple.
I have a lot of junk video's. Lots of low bitrate stuff, all manner of formats both audio and video and even a few HD videos, but not tons. I've always used a particular movie in my collection as my reference for testing XBMC builds as it's particularly crappy. I look for studders. My Samsung Smart TV plays this movie (streaming through smarthub) about as good as I could ever imagine). Smooth, no studdters or pauses. The smarthub app seems to make all my movies look better but has a lousy Gui which is nothing more than a crude file manager. So I use this as my comparison. My GBox midnight plays this video with all kinds of studders. Tried different firmware, different XBMC Builds etc no improvement. Not a buffering issue but a playback issue. Even moved the movie onto the box itself with no improvement. My RPi played the movie with slightly less studdering and when I turned on De-interlace it played it almost as good as the samsung TV. This became my new reference point for XBMC. Unfortunatly while I love the price of the RPi and the fun I had tinkering around with it, the GUI is slow. Now I've got a Fire and love the speed of the GUI. Nice and zippy. When I try and play my reference movie, it does have studder (Gotham). I can't turn on de-interlace because I believe that function is disabled because we have to use libstragefreight instead of mediacodec
When I allowed mediacodel and turned on deinterlace I got lots of slow mo playback.So I just installed the SP Frodo build and will configure and try that. To be honest the way I use XBMC I could live using FRODO.
I'm enjoying this box so far. Still have tinkering to do, but like it's speed. Oh, and there is the whole Amazon side as well.
Roveer
I was so surprised when I loaded the SP Frodo build and didn't get an XBMC icon or splash screen. What is the SP Build and how does it get to be called something other than XBMC? I'm guessing it's an experimental build?
