ATV 1 and XBMC frodo

theslaz said:

Success. I think!!!
Didn’t realize that all I would get is Xbmc. Thought that it would be embedded into the Atv program. Shows what I know. Will play with it for awhile. May put the Atv back to it’s original format; or go out and buy a new one and leave this just for Xbmc.

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Correct, its native linux xbmc. thats it. It squeezes the most out of the atv 1 plus chd .

The default skin I have there is pecinko's excellent quartz skin which largely mirrors the best atv stock ui (yeah, I worked a bit with him).

If you are running the chd chip the atv 1 with this distro will eat up an atv 3 all day long. Lol, I know cause I have one in its box in the closet!.

There are a few things about this you might want to know how to operate etc. Like it automounts the Media partition to your mac for easy drag and drop content transfer to the atv 1's internal drive. etc. There is an extreme amount of flexibility imo in this setup though that said ( I am a big fan of apple's ease of use ui) thanks to imo the default Quartz skin. I tried hard to make it out of the box as much like the apple ui with the power of the linux backend and xbmc media flexibility.

Let me know what I can help with in evaluating this distro.

As well if you want to ssh into the atv 1 and compile and install Frodo 12.2 ( you have 12.1) I can help you with that. Its only a few lines in your mac's terminal.

If you want a test (and presuming you have the crystalHD card installed) feed it a raw decrypted blu ray file .

Then try it on an atv 3 (hint: it can't be done).

Have fun!

Just so you know .. anything that runs xbmc as an "appliance" on the stock atv os has a hideous disadvantage. ... frankly the stock atv os eats waaay to much ram. The Atv 1 only has 256 mb of ram. The stock atv OS uses almost that much simply to operate. So while an atv 1 on the stock os running xbmc *can* decode 1080p with the chd ... it cannot render it to display ... so it downscales it to 720p at best, at worst about 544p.

That's why running a stripped linux lean os behind xbmc leaves plenty of ram to decode and render to display true 1080p at up to 60 fps and beyond. In short, the chd does all of the heavy lifting. That with a very light skin on xbmc means the system is very responsive on all fronts.

I just repurposed my old ATV1 as well, using the OpenELEC and the BCM970015 Crystal HD. $30 hardware upgrade and it is my favorite media device again. No issues whatsoever. Well worth the upgrade for anyone on the fence.

It still eats 48% of the stock RAM at any one time, but it feels much more responsive than running under the official AppleTV install.

theslaz said:

Well my experience with Xbmc on my Atv was not a good one. As was pointed out; Xbmc turned out to be a memory hog. Nothing would work properly and of course; nothing would play properly. I made the decision to revert the Atv back to it’s original format. Tried, and it did not work. Will look for help in another post on this forum. I’m sure; I’m doing something wrong!

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Well, did you use the atvcloner distro ? I am looking at top on the same distro via ssh and it uses about 24 % cpu (much less than the stock os x software). ? Confused why it didn't work well for you or at least better than stock.

I presume you are using a chd card for video playback ? If not yes, xbmc will use up all of the cpu as it cannot access the built in nvidia geoforcego 7300 to handle video decoding which means its actually less efficient than the stock atv 1 os (as all video decoding is done just on the cpu). With the chd card you should have no issues running xbmc (linux) on 1080p.