HD in ATV... Not so good??

**telemu** · February 15th, 2009, 05:27 PM

Hello people!

First of all, I'm not familiar with Unix, linux or even Terminal... I know a few things and I can Copy Paste... And i know how to read...

Needless to say I'm THE guy who actually NEEDS these forums in order to get anything done.

With your precious help i was able to setup my ATV in maybe 1 hour. Great tutorials for the patchstick, installed XBMC and Boxee in a few minutes, everything went perfect!! I then used the NitoTV add software to do a couple of things, but never managed to get USB enabled. And yes, i followed instructions and had the combo update in Documents... the easy NitoTV solutions gave me an error... nevermind that now.

My real problem is much simpler: .mkv HD (720p) doesnt play well at all!! full of hiccups, small freezes milliseconds long... really a huge let-down. OK, according to VLC (playing on my macbook) the stream bitrate at times was over 20000kb/s, but doesnt mean that much does it?

I know ATV handles (according to apple) only up to 6000... isnt that really slim for HD??

Am I doing something wrong or am I just asking way toomuch from ATV's hardware?

I loved Boxee and am currently devising a cunning plan to build a PC (or maybe mac mini) to use as a media center, any ideas on that as well??

Thanks again for all your help... I keep being amazed with how easy you all make this seem.

**peterjcat** · February 16th, 2009, 01:27 AM

I'm afraid you'll always have trouble playing HD files on the current AppleTV. It has a relatively slow processor, much less powerful than most computers these days. It has a reasonable graphics co-processor which allows Front Row to play 720p H.264 at pretty good bitrates (probably about all you need from 720p) but the big BUT is that only the official Apple player has access to the graphics chip at the moment, everything else (Boxee included) has to make do with the main processor. There's no way it'll do anything like 20000 kbps (which is insanely high for 720p).

It would be nice if Apple opened up the AppleTV to allow other applications access to the graphics processor, or if someone at Boxee/XMBC/etc worked out how to do it, but until that happens the only way to play most HD video on the AppleTV is to recode it to AppleTV specs (eg with Handbrake) and play it officially.

BUT if you want to get a C2D Mac Mini and run Boxee on that, it'll handle just about anything.

**telemu** · February 16th, 2009, 04:14 AM

Thanks Peter, I figured about as much, but I didn't know that the graph processor was off-limits to boxee or anything other than apple... pretty interesting.
Knowing apple, they might actually do a better version of the ATV, but i dont really believe they will open up these resourses. But I can hope!

It bothers me because the atv is a really sweet machine, still I cant play most HD content on it.
Kind of defeats the purpose of retiring my old xbox running XBMC.

And another thing, on my xbox, xbmc runs super smooth and fast, never crashes. Boxee was really slow on my ATV, is this normal for everyone? It sometimes took about 1 minute to open a folder or something simple like that.

I know im used to xbox with xbmc, wich is pretty much streamlined by now, it had thousands of hours of work put into it from people all over the world, and it works flawlessly. I was kinda surprised when boxee didn't run as smooth... I've been asking around and it seems it DOES run smooth on linux and mac installs... is it just the atv that makes it sluggish at times?

Peas, im out!

**peterjcat** · February 16th, 2009, 03:27 PM

Same issue I'd say. Boxee is still in alpha of course, and I'm sure there'll be further optimisation for AppleTV down the line, but in the end the AppleTV doesn't give them much to work with. I can confirm that Boxee on the Mac is extremely springy and responsive.

AppleTV has an old 1GHz Pentium M chip, a far cry from the 2GHz C2D on the current Mac Mini. I think there's a pretty good chance we'll see a new AppleTV of some kind especially since the hardware hasn't changed for so long. Hope so.

**Xibalba** · February 16th, 2009, 11:14 PM

Originally Posted by telemu

It bothers me because the atv is a really sweet machine, still I cant play most HD content on it.
Kind of defeats the purpose of retiring my old xbox running XBMC.

And another thing, on my xbox, xbmc runs super smooth and fast, never crashes. Boxee was really slow on my ATV, is this normal for everyone? It sometimes took about 1 minute to open a folder or something simple like that.

The xbox - even running XBMC - has a slower processor (733 MHz) than the AppleTV (1 GHz) and thus cannot handle much HD content very smoothly at all.

I have been running Boxee on my new MacBook and Mac Mini but will find out if the AppleTV version is much slower when mine arrives tomorrow. It would be nice to see an updated AppleTV hardware since we are far away from the official Boxee hardware...

**Kiggold** · February 17th, 2009, 12:13 AM

atv cannot do anything above 480p, period.

**davilla** · February 17th, 2009, 12:44 AM

I call bull on that

I regularly view 720p content recorded from a HD-PVR on my AppleTVs. The key is to not expect it to handle any three letter video format without understanding exactly what is inside those video fomats.

MediaInfo is a good tool the will expose these important bits.

Main 3.1 or 4.1 h.264 will play fine as will 720 mpeg2. 1080i/1080p is not possible but 720p, PROVIDED you choose the proper encoding, will play fine.

**Kiggold** · February 17th, 2009, 11:42 PM

Originally Posted by davilla

I call bull on that

I regularly view 720p content recorded from a HD-PVR on my AppleTVs. The key is to not expect it to handle any three letter video format without understanding exactly what is inside those video fomats.

MediaInfo is a good tool the will expose these important bits.

Main 3.1 or 4.1 h.264 will play fine as will 720 mpeg2. 1080i/1080p is not possible but 720p, PROVIDED you choose the proper encoding, will play fine.

The AppleTV is physically not powerful enough to HD content natively.
Specs --> here or here

However, if you have some scheme to make it "play" "720p" content, by all means knock yourself out

**davilla** · February 18th, 2009, 12:38 AM

Your quoted specs mean squat. One URL is Apple's conservative spec using it's codecs, the other is a parts listing.

As one of the major 3rd party AppleTV devs who has spent a large amount of time poking and probing inside the AppleTV hardware and software, I think I'm in a much better position than most to know just what the AppleTV can do and cannot do.

But if you choose to limit yourself to 480p content, that's your loss. I and others will continue to enjoy our HD content on our AppleTVs.

**Carniphage** · February 18th, 2009, 10:46 AM

Originally Posted by Kiggold

However, if you have some scheme to make it "play" "720p" content, by all means knock yourself out

Here's the scheme.
You get a 720p file.
Convert it to an AppleTV friendly format using VisualHub.

Play movie.

I think Apple would have noticed that the AppleTV was unable to "play" 720p content before they started selling it on iTunes.

C.