Hi Sam -
First off, great work
! I guess I'm lucky as I never even owned an ATV until I saw this thread and bought one specifically to use as an XBMC player with component video. Super easy, very few headaches and I was up and running in a matter of hours (would have been minutes save the xorg.conf updates for Component!)
One question - (NOT complaining! Just asking if this is typical!)
Is it normal to have some judder or stutter on video start up, after a pause or after seeking? Specifically when I start a video it usually (but not always) takes about 1 - 2 seconds to start playing audio and then another second or two to start video. The audio continues normally but the video is jerky, maybe 2 or 3 frames per second for maybe 3 to some times 10 seconds. (I can get a debug log.)
The behavior is the same with resuming from a full stop, resuming from pause or resuming from a FF or 30 second jump; i.e. any time video starts. Once the stutter is gone I have not seen it come back, so as far as I am concerned the unit works just fine, but I’m curious if I can improve this. File size and bit rate are not a factor and sometimes a video will play instantly, and sometimes the same video will stutter for a few seconds.
I have converted over to all NFS shares from my Synology NAS (DS110j with only a D-Link gigabit switch in-between) and this helped a little since with SMB I could crash XBMC by seeking too much.
Also, this behavior is specific to the Broadcom card (the older “12” version and old layout) since XVID files play and seek instantly every time. H.264 (MKV/MP4) files exhibit the behavior above more often than not.
As background -
I have an ATV1 booting to 16GB USB thumb drive with no internal HDD. I also removed the fan completely for a totally silent and very stable video player. I updated the xorg.conf via SSH and the com.apple.Boot.plist via the GParted live CD. I have edited the Advancedsettings.xml to enable DDS fan art and verified that it is crating DDS files.
Also, I have an ATV2 upstairs being fed by the same NAS with no issues at all. Videos play instantly (1 second of “working”) and seek normally.