pike Wrote:does linux for AppleTV have 3d accelerated drivers ?
The nice thing about Apple TV is that unlike the old Xbox (which uses customized chipset and GPU) Apple simply took a standard
Mobile Intel Centrino 915PM Express chipset (featuring
Intel ICH7 7.1 High Definition Audio) and a standard
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 GPU (graphic processor chip), making the Apple TV basically just a laptop computer with a proprietary operating-system and without a built-in keyboard/trackpad and display that normally is attached to laptop computer. So we can just use the normal proprietary binary device drivers that NVIDIA provides for Linux, (or we can choose to use the open source drivers if we clike, but I doubt those are as good as the closed source one NVIDIA provides, at least not yet, though I'm not sure what the license sais about distributing the proprietary binary device drivers from NVIDIA on Live CD).
http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/AppleTV
The NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 GPU also supports
NVIDIA's PureVideo™ technology for H.264, WMV, and MPEG-2 Hardware Acceleration, NIVIDIA does unfortunatly not yet provide a Linux library or SDK for accessing that PureVideo API, (nor have I heard of NIVIDIA releasing any specifications or technical documentation for it, so as far as I know no one in the open source community have tried reverse engineering to gain access to it for adding support to it via
XvMC), however motion compensation (mo comp) and iDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) is probably still supported via
XvMC, at least for MPEG-2 (I don't know the current development state of
XvMC and MPEG-4.
XvMC is open source after all, maybe can look at
The Unichrome Project and
The openChrome Project provide code patched which adds MPEG-4 hardware acceleration to FFmepg and MPlayer via
XvMC). Alternativly maybe our developers or
FFmpeg/
MPlayer developers can write pixel-shaders for Shader Model 3.0 using the
Cg (C for graphics) programming language which
NVIDIA do provide a lot of developer tools and documentation for, (maybe by using the
Lib Sh or other existing open source
GPGPU library/code as a base). The
GPGPU and the GPU programming community is pretty big, I'm sure a solution can be found somewhere. I think the different codec decoding processes that could possible be accelerated that way in are; Motion Compensation (mo comp), Inverse Transform (iDCT), inverse quantization (IQ), in-loop deblocking, bitstream processing (CAVLC/CABAC), Variable-Length Decoding (VLD), and de-interlacing. Who knows now, offload all those together on the GPU (plus all CPU optimizations available) then we might even someday be able to pull off native 1080p H.264 video, which is probably the most demanding video codec we got today. By then maybe NVIDIA will decide to open up the PureVideo API, that would be irony for you, hehe
http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
Even though Apple as currently limited Apple TV to 1080i as the maximum output resolution, the hardware does support 1080p as the maximum output resolution. It is possible to speculate that Apple will do like Microsoft did with the Xbox 360 and release a firmware update that will enable 1080p output on all Apple TV boxes. I don't even know if Linux on Apple TV is limited, it depends if the restriction is hardcoded in the firmware/BIOS or if it is just a limitation set in the Apple TV operating-system.
_max_ Wrote:You CANT lock down xbmc to a specific motherboard, motherboards arn't sold for more than 6-12 months (6 if noone buys them, even less, 12 if they are _really_ popular..) What happens after 12 months? support the next montherboard with an entire different sb/nb chipset? its stupid trying to get xbmc on a computer, the only thnig it would work on for longer than 12 months is a console.
@
_max_, you quoted my whole post but it does not sound like you actually read more than the first section, if you would have read the whole thing then you would know that that also suggest Apple TV has that primary locked-down computer hardware platform, and yes Apple TV is a computer and yes it has a motherboard inside of it and yes Apple will sell it for years to come, (they might come with an updated model in a couple of year but then we just have to support that new model of Apple TV as well and the old one). I also suggested VIA EPIA embedded motherboard which also have a very long life-cycle because they are designed to be used in applienses, so VIA manufactures each model for 5-years+ (and by then it is probably time for XBMC to support a new hardware platform anyhow). Besides, you will be able to run XBMC on any Linux dist on any hardware you like and add any drivers you like yourself, as long as you do not ask for support in these forums or our official IRC-channel if and when you run into problems with it on.
mace Wrote:The A TV is a nice box and i would love to see it as a XBMC box but as I reed the specs, it does require a TV with DVI/HDMI input. Isn't that a little tough demand on the low-end alternative?
I would like to add a SCART or S-video output as a requirement on the low-end variant. These outputs will lower quality but they will provide a possibility to hook up to older TV.
If you TV that only supports SCART or S-Video then why not just stick with the old Xbox for XBMC?, your not going to get high-definition via SCART or S-Video anyway. Anyhow, the Apple TV box does features
component video (RGB) ports as well, and many television sets, especially in Europe and Japan, utilize RGB via the SCART connector. If your TV supports RGB via SCART then all you need is a RGB to SCART adapter, one of those doesn't cost much and are not hard to find. There are also RGB to S-Video, and RGB to Composit, and RGB to VGA media converter available to buy.