danieldk
01-26-2010, 11:34 AM
I have an Apple TV. And I love it :). In The Netherlands, the device is fairly limited, as there are no movie rental yet (in contrast to e.g. the USA and Germany). But still, I can synchronize my iTunes Music collection, and play 720p H.264 movies in an MPEG container.
One of the first things I did was to use ATV-Flash to unleash its real power. This is a patchstick that you boot the Apple TV with, and it will install SSH, and optionally some other applications. The nice thing is that the Apple TV is suddenly an open OS X 10.4 machine, so you can install Perian for codecs other than H.264, and other containers than MPEG (such as Matroska). I also used it to install some other applications, such as additional media centers (Boxee, XBMC).
Unfortunately, the Apple TV does not use hardware acceleration, and is only powerful enough to play 720p movies. In principle that is ok, since I use my TV in 720p (rather than 1080i, it does not support 1080p). However, some movies are just 1080p, and the device can not decode them fast enough (to downscale afterwards).
Now the nifty thing is that Broadcom makes some hardware H.264 decoder chips, that can easily do 1080p. And even nicer is that these are available as mini-PCIE cards, for around 15 Euros. The Apple TV has one mini-PCIE slot, used for the wireless card. I have now replaced the wireless card by a H.264 decoder card. Some people have recently published drivers, and added support for this card to XBMC[1]. Except for some bugs in the development builds of XBMC, performance has improved enormously. The AppleTV is now able to play 1080p movies without much effort. There are occasional hick-ups, but these are known problems in the current development version of XBMC. In a few weeks or months, the dust will probably settle down :).
[1] http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broadcom-crystal-hd-its-magic/
One of the first things I did was to use ATV-Flash to unleash its real power. This is a patchstick that you boot the Apple TV with, and it will install SSH, and optionally some other applications. The nice thing is that the Apple TV is suddenly an open OS X 10.4 machine, so you can install Perian for codecs other than H.264, and other containers than MPEG (such as Matroska). I also used it to install some other applications, such as additional media centers (Boxee, XBMC).
Unfortunately, the Apple TV does not use hardware acceleration, and is only powerful enough to play 720p movies. In principle that is ok, since I use my TV in 720p (rather than 1080i, it does not support 1080p). However, some movies are just 1080p, and the device can not decode them fast enough (to downscale afterwards).
Now the nifty thing is that Broadcom makes some hardware H.264 decoder chips, that can easily do 1080p. And even nicer is that these are available as mini-PCIE cards, for around 15 Euros. The Apple TV has one mini-PCIE slot, used for the wireless card. I have now replaced the wireless card by a H.264 decoder card. Some people have recently published drivers, and added support for this card to XBMC[1]. Except for some bugs in the development builds of XBMC, performance has improved enormously. The AppleTV is now able to play 1080p movies without much effort. There are occasional hick-ups, but these are known problems in the current development version of XBMC. In a few weeks or months, the dust will probably settle down :).
[1] http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broadcom-crystal-hd-its-magic/