[mythtv-users] MythFrontend on an AppleTV

Todd Ignasiak ignasiak at gmail.com
Tue May 22 15:39:17 UTC 2007


On 5/22/07, James Buckley <xanium4332 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 22/05/07, Neil Raymond <neil_raymond at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >Can the AppleTV play standard (i.e. mpeg2) HD,  if so that would be
> great.
> >
> > I don't yet know. I don't have access to any HD material in this format.
> > I've downloaded some episodes of Lost in 720p but they're all in mkv
> files,
> > and I'm still trying to work out how to get them into a format that Myth
> can
> > handle. Any suggestions would be great. And If you can point me in the
> > direction of some HD mpeg2 content that I can download I'll give that a
> try
> > too.
> >
> > >Also, is MythTV stable? If so I might need to cancel an order pronto...
> >
> > It certainly seems stable. I've had it running for about a week now, it
> > hasn't stopped responding or needed a reboot for any other reason.
> >
> > The only slight niggle is that it takes a while for recordings to start
> > playing. About 5-6 seconds of a black screen before it starts - just long
> > enough for me to think that maybe it's broken this time - but it has never
> > not started playing.
> >
> > All in all I'm very happy with it. Considering it only cost 200GBP,
> there's
> > no way I could build something that small, quiet and good-looking myself
> for
> > that money and have it work this well.
> >
> > Neil
>
>
> Yeah the HDMI is really attractive, however I think maybe BOB deinterlacing
> on 1080i content might push it a little.
>
> Elephants Dream (the open source movie) is available in HD. I think it is
> 1080i and mpeg2, can't remember but judging on size it must be (it's only
> like 8 minutes long). You can get it from
> http://orange.blender.org/download I'd really like to know
> whether it can handle 1080i with BOB deinterlacing, as I might have to
> cancel a new graphics card I just order (like 2 hours ago), that has HDMI,
> and replace my current fromtend with an AppleTV. Any chance you could
> download (say like a 1/10 of the movie), and try to play it. It won't matter
> if you don't have it all, Myth will still play it. To download it just use
> Firefox to start it off then copy the .part file it creates for the
> download, rename to what it should be called, and try it).

Several of those files would be interesting tests..   But, the only
MPEG2 files appear to be the "making of" video and a DVD image.  I
really doubt 1080i MPEG2 will be playable on the AppleTV, especially
not with BOB deint.   The CPU is a 1GHz Pentium-M, and neither Apple's
MPEG2 codec nor free software like VLC or Myth support MPEG2
acceleration.     (Other than the Accellent project)

The HD H.264 videos would be interesting, to see whether Apple's
5Mbps/24fps specifications are limits of the AppleTV device, or rules
of thumb for keeping the file size and download times limited.
I'm assuming that the AppleTV offloads H.264 processing to the GPU,
because I don't think a 1GHz Pentium-M would be able to do 720p H.264.
  It would be interesting to see what the limits of the system are for
H.264 processing.

This box may end up being more interesting for you Europeans using
H.264 than it is for us Americans using MPEG2.  Well, that's assuming
that Myth could either take advantage of the accelerated playback, or
hook recordings into the iTunes structure for playback via the
accelerated Apple  software.


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