2015-09-09, 03:42
OpenELEC (unofficial) v5.95.5 (Kodi Isengard v15.1)
IMPORTANT!!!
This build requires a different partition layout to all OpenELEC AppleTV installations before v5.95.4. To update from an earlier release keeping your current library, addons and configuration you will need to follow a simple backup > install > restore procedure. The same process can be used to migrate from Crystalbuntu. If you store media on an external USB drive or NAS the procedure should take no more than ~10 minutes. If you store media on the internal drive (and want to keep it) the files must be moved off-box first which will take longer. I apologise for the inconvenience, but users with a CrystalHD card will like these builds
In the past OpenELEC "had a few challenges" with CrystalHD but these are 95%+ resolved. It will never be 100% with a 1GHz single-core CPU and 256MB RAM in the box, but following one of life's "in hindsight it's obvious" moments some important packaging changes have been made, and combined with other performance tweaks I can now play a 43GB Blu-Ray ISO in my collection smoothly (scenes up to 38-40Mb/sec and previously impossible) while more sensibly sized media starts in seconds.
If you understand creating installer USB's and want to rush straight to a clean install:
Install to HDD: OpenELEC-ATV.i386-5.95.5-hdd.img.gz
Install to USB: OpenELEC-ATV.i386-5.95.5-usb.img.gz
To manually update from v5.95.4 use the file below (unzip to .tar first):
Update file: OpenELEC-ATV.i386-5.95.5.tar.gz
If creating installers means nothing or you want to preserve media and configuration; please follow the links below to instructions on backup, creating the OpenELEC USB installer, and restoring the backup after installation.
Make a Backup - Make the Installer USB on MacOS, Windows, Linux - Restore a Backup
Usage & Configuration Notes
Using a BCM970012 card I've experienced a black screen or light stuttering at playback start with some media. If I hit rewind on the remote (small skip back) I will 9/10 times see video and smooth playback. I do not see these issues with a newer BCM970015 card. Both cards benefit from accurate Xorg modelines and "Adjust Refresh" enabled to avoid the CPU load from telecine conversion to 60Hz. Most media I have plays fine at 60Hz and the "instant" start to playback is nice, but at larger media file sizes you need "Adjust Refresh" enabled; it's the difference between smooth consistent playback and unresolvable stuttering when the CPU simply cannot keep up. I find a 0.4-0.5 second pause prevents audio/video from getting too far out of sync during the refresh rate change and resync is resolved quicker.
Core services (samba, avahi and cron) are disabled by default in this build. You can enable them again if needed, but they all consume RAM the box doesn't have so it's better to leave them off. The first rendering of subtitles also causes a CPU spike that results in frame drops so I backported a Jarvis feature that defaults them to off.
The build has buffermode=1 (buffering to disk) with readbufferfactor=4 and a cachemembuffersize value of 10MB pre-set in the embedded advancedsettings.xml file. In testing a larger cache size makes no visible difference to how things work. This is a different from older OpenELEC and Crystalbuntu installations where a large cache often helped. You can override the defaults via /storage/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml but the default settings work well.
Support and Future Updates
Although I am OpenELEC project staff this is released as an unofficial "community" build. It is not supported by the core project team (most of whom believe AppleTV to be dead and something that should remain deceased) but if you create a forum topic to ask questions I will do my best to help (post questions directly in the forum, not via PM please). As this is an unofficial build automatic updates will not work and future beta, rc, and 6.0.x final releases will require a manual update. This is a simple procedure, and with OpenELEC it only takes a couple of minutes. I will post release announcements via a thread in the OpenELEC forums.
AppleTV forum area: http://openelec.tv/forum/123-apple-atv-mk1
NB: I've already been asked about my long-term plans with this build. I will definitely push a 6.0 final release. What comes after that really depends on the Kodi codebase. I won't make promises, but OpenELEC is a stable and simple build-system to work within so as long as it remains possible to patch CrystalHD into Jarvis (and beyond) I don't see why things won't keep going.
Credits
The resurrection of OpenELEC on AppleTV is my own labour of love and incompetence, but I owe thanks to vpeter for helping me hack CrystalHD to run on 4.1.x kernels, and Soli for the packaging suggestion and help with testing this release. At some point I will attempt to push all the changes to my github account, but I am a git n00b (contrary to popular belief I am not a developer) so it might take a while. If you've any specific questions on the build or AppleTV things in general please ask in the forums.
Enjoy
chewitt
Copy & Pasted Information ---> http://chewitt.openelec.tv/appletv/
