[Jaken]

will ubuntu 8.04.3 work?

[Evinyatar]

Thanks for the tip, gimli Finally decided to shrink my media partition and do a proper Hardy install. Totem with CrystalHD works fine now.
Got XBMC with CrystalHD running now and at first glance I'm quite impressed by how much smoother the GUI is compared to ATV and the XBMC Live experiment I did a while back! Unfortunately the video itself is a bit screwed up. It appears frames are not being played in the right order and often there's a black frame in there somewhere too. I'm blaming the driver version. dmesg tells me:

Code:

[ 6638.011135] Opening new user[0] handle
[ 6638.011145] Starting BCM70012 Device
[ 6638.210393] CInitializing Dio pool 10 1024 505c c4410780
[ 6639.876794] Firmware Downloaded Successfully
[ 6640.027597] DelQAddr:4fd60 RelQAddr:4fe64
[ 6640.452435] App PIB:0 0 420 2 1f 220 220 0 0 0
[ 6640.455900] [b]*ERR*:/usr/src/modules/bcm70012kmod/mpclink/bc_link_cmds.c:464: RX->Invalid Arg 00000000 0[/b]
[ 6641.873356] list_index:1 rx[1] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0
[ 6670.414421] list_index:1 rx[2] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0
[ 6687.613096] list_index:1 rx[3] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0
[ 6718.849019] list_index:1 rx[4] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0

[davilla]

Thanks for the tip, gimli Finally decided to shrink my media partition and do a proper Hardy install. Totem with CrystalHD works fine now.
Got XBMC with CrystalHD running now and at first glance I'm quite impressed by how much smoother the GUI is compared to ATV and the XBMC Live experiment I did a while back! Unfortunately the video itself is a bit screwed up. It appears frames are not being played in the right order and often there's a black frame in there somewhere too. I'm blaming the driver version. dmesg tells me:

Code:

[ 6638.011135] Opening new user[0] handle
[ 6638.011145] Starting BCM70012 Device
[ 6638.210393] CInitializing Dio pool 10 1024 505c c4410780
[ 6639.876794] Firmware Downloaded Successfully
[ 6640.027597] DelQAddr:4fd60 RelQAddr:4fe64
[ 6640.452435] App PIB:0 0 420 2 1f 220 220 0 0 0
[ 6640.455900] [b]*ERR*:/usr/src/modules/bcm70012kmod/mpclink/bc_link_cmds.c:464: RX->Invalid Arg 00000000 0[/b]
[ 6641.873356] list_index:1 rx[1] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0
[ 6670.414421] list_index:1 rx[2] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0
[ 6687.613096] list_index:1 rx[3] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0
[ 6718.849019] list_index:1 rx[4] Y:10 UV:10 Int:2800 YDnSz:0 UVDnSz:0

That ERR is normal, we have not tracked it down. Two things, 1) svn version of the crystalhd branch you a building, 2) md5 checksum of bcmFilePlayFw.bin.

Remember, this is a development branch. It's not perfect but is complete enough to demonstrate proof-of-principal. There are demuxer feed issues and picture retrieval issues still being worked out.

[davilla]

will ubuntu 8.04.3 work?

yes, any 8.04 flavor is fine.

[Evinyatar]

This was SVN revision 25101. MD5 checksum: aa7b6bec69bd1ec9515718c4eb776b40
Not every video I tried has this problem. I'll see if I can find what the ones that do have in common.

[davilla]

This was SVN revision 25101. MD5 checksum: aa7b6bec69bd1ec9515718c4eb776b40
Not every video I tried has this problem. I'll see if I can find what the ones that do have in common.

1080p mkv's with h.264 cabac and 5 ref frames will decode with bad macro blocking. These mkv's are actually encoded wrong and violate the h264 spec. ffmpeg is more forgiving with these files.

MediaInfo will tell all about the suspect video files.

Enable pixel buffer objects in settings -> system -> video, makes a big difference in CPU performance.

[Evinyatar]

Just 1080p? Because the ones I'm having problems with are 720p cabac/5 ref. Totem plays them fine with the Crystal HD though so I'm glad it's not a hardware limitation

[dan1son]

Alright so I'm having some playback oddities. Basically what I'm seeing is some black bars at the top randomly as well as what appears to be vsync issues.

I'm also having some problems getting the refresh rates to line up. If I set it to 60hz in nvidia-settings, xbmc thinks it 81hz. If I set it to 24hz in the nvidia settings, xbmc thinks it's 52. If I leave the settings alone XBMC thinks it's 50hz. My TV only supports 60hz or 24hz at 1920x1080 so that might explain the vsync issues.

I've tried turning off and on vsync settings in nvidia-settings and XBMC back and forth without much luck. Any tips on that?

Oh, I also can't seem to run xbmc as a non-root user. Get Seg faults.

[davilla]

Just 1080p? Because the ones I'm having problems with are 720p cabac/5 ref. Totem plays them fine with the Crystal HD though so I'm glad it's not a hardware limitation

That's a good data point there, if Totem is playing them fine, then there's something missing with our bitstream to bytestream convert. We are using an ffmpeg routine and Totem (crystalhd gstreamer plug in) is using a Broadcom written conversion routine. I'd really like to grab this code and use it but I can't stick it into svn until that code moves gpl/lgpl.

[davilla]

Alright so I'm having some playback oddities. Basically what I'm seeing is some black bars at the top randomly as well as what appears to be vsync issues.

I'm also having some problems getting the refresh rates to line up. If I set it to 60hz in nvidia-settings, xbmc thinks it 81hz. If I set it to 24hz in the nvidia settings, xbmc thinks it's 52. If I leave the settings alone XBMC thinks it's 50hz. My TV only supports 60hz or 24hz at 1920x1080 so that might explain the vsync issues.

I've tried turning off and on vsync settings in nvidia-settings and XBMC back and forth without much luck. Any tips on that?

Oh, I also can't seem to run xbmc as a non-root user. Get Seg faults.

off, never see these and I always run xbmc as non-root.

make sure that composite is off in xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

Other fun settings, RMDisableRenderToSysmem and DynamicTwinView:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "RegistryDwords" "RMDisableRenderToSysmem=1"
Option "DynamicTwinView" "false"
EndSection

[cake]

Enable pixel buffer objects in settings -> system -> video, makes a big difference in CPU performance.

Is that the lcd/vfd option?

Nevermind, i found it

[dan1son]

Wow Davilla, those changes made the GUI super smooth.

I turned off vsync inside the xbmc interface and left it on in the nvidia-settings and so far I haven't noticed the oddities.

The interface is uncomparably smoother than it is on the ATV OS. It's quite wonderful with this setup. Thanks for forcing me to go through the long trouble of putting Ubuntu on this box and for the crystalHD support. Consider me BLOWN AWAY!

1080p/24hz playback is amazing on this thing.

Scratch that vsync fix... still having same issue with odd jitters and black bars at the top occasionally.

[davilla]

up to r25106, the frame display jumping should be resolved. still sort of a hack but at least now it's inside the crystalhd class and not in the renderer.

[andrereis]

Here's a couple of questions for the *NIX gurus in here:

1- When you say it only works with Ubuntu 8.04 due to the kernel version, is it really just because of the kernel? Or is the system's toolchain also relevant?

2- If (1), it's just the kernel, can I get a Gentoo install but use Ubuntu's 8.04 kernel sources instead? I'm going to try this but if it's a no-no they you just saved me a couple hours of pointless work

3- If I nuke the AppleTV hard drive without backing it up, can I get an image to restore it somewhere on the net?

4- Since an official announcement from Broadcom could still be many weeks away, perhaps our community could set up a .deb for Ubuntu8.04 that would result in a working installation of XBMC and kernel driver (can it be a <M> module?) so that people don't have to procure code, files and instructions from all over the net?

Cheers everyone

[cake]

1080p playback working smoothly here as well It is pretty "choppy" at first, but it might be related to buffering? It seems as xbmc has enough resources to play with but the system in general is slow and sluggish. Did you guys do any other tweaking other than the stuff davilla already mentioned? I guess I'd be better off running xfce instead of gnome..