Wrong screen resolution in Boxee on ATV

**bira** · February 17th, 2010, 08:11 AM

Apologies is this has been addressed elsewhere - I didn't find it by searching.

I just finished (re)installing Boxee (and all else via the 'Boxee Bleeding Beta Baby') on my Apple TV (version 3.0.2 if it matters).

Anyway, Boxee now shows my resolution as 720p (1280xsomething). My TV is 1080p (1920xsomething) - and that is rightly displayed in Apple TV's settings. However, as said, in Boxee it is downgraded.

How do I change this? I couldn't find the settings for this inside Boxee.

Thank you,

Bira

**dan1son** · February 17th, 2010, 08:27 AM

This is a limitation with the AppleTV OS. Everything is forced to 720p no matter what. XBMC/Boxee both have this issue and it just hasn't been worked on by any of the devs.

Yes the AppleTV outputs 1080p resolutions, everything is still actually in 720p just upconverted to 1080p. That's impossible to notice with the AppleTV software and their content (it's all 720p content anyway), but in Boxee/XBMC 1080p would be useful.

Currently to get 1080p on an ATV you need to install Linux on it. http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/

1080p won't matter much for the ATV though, unless you're running XBMC with a Broadcom CrystalHD card. http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/b...-hd-its-magic/

**JimWiley** · February 17th, 2010, 08:33 AM

Originally Posted by bira

Apologies is this has been addressed elsewhere - I didn't find it by searching.

I just finished (re)installing Boxee (and all else via the 'Boxee Bleeding Beta Baby') on my Apple TV (version 3.0.2 if it matters).

Anyway, Boxee now shows my resolution as 720p (1280xsomething). My TV is 1080p (1920xsomething) - and that is rightly displayed in Apple TV's settings. However, as said, in Boxee it is downgraded.

How do I change this? I couldn't find the settings for this inside Boxee.

Thank you,

Bira

There is some reason that the ATV doesn't display 1080p - I have read about this on the XBMC forum. Something like apple doesn't document it's display modes and things need to be reverse-engineered? Something like that anyway. Since Boxee is built on XBMC originally, maybe it has inherited this problem, too? The XBMC devs are trying to iron out hardware accelerated 1080p playback on ATV before they even attempt to look at the 1080p display problem. Although it will be the next logical step after CrystalHD is totally nailed. Then after this has been sorted at XBMC, then the Boxee devs would have to pick it up when it's pushed downstream (and they would have to want to incorporate the fix also, which would be dependant on whether they intend to incorporate CrystalHD support themselves). With all that taken into consideration, seems like it might be a bit of a wait!

Bottom line is Boxee cannot playback 1080p content on the ATV yet. And I very much doubt it can display 1080p on the ATV (unless recent builds have it, or it was already fixed long ago and I missed it).

Jim