[mythtv-users] OT: XBMC on Apple TV2 and iPad

[Raymond Wagner]

On 1/21/2011 15:41, Matt Emmott wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Tom Bongiorno <tom at bongohut.com 
> <mailto:tom at bongohut.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Matt Emmott <memmott at gmail.com
>     <mailto:memmott at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     > On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Richard Morton
>     <richard.e.morton at gmail.com <mailto:richard.e.morton at gmail.com>>
>     > wrote:
>     >>
>     http://xbmc.org/theuni/2011/01/20/you-asked-for-it-xbmc-for-appletv2-ipad-
>     <http://xbmc.org/theuni/2011/01/20/you-asked-for-it-xbmc-for-appletv2-ipad-iphone4/>iphone4/
>     >
>     > Holy crap, this changes everything. Full XBMC on all the
>     devices? My head
>     > just exploded.
>
>     This changes everything for what?  MythTV?  XBMC only supports up to
>     MythTV 0.23.  Also, what would we be giving up using an XBMC frontend?
>
>
> It changes everything in that, you now have a small portable device 
> with a great front end to all your media.

This changes nothing, yet.  The published performance specs for the A4 
chip are hardware accelerated h.264 up to Main Level 3.1.  No MPEG2, so 
that cuts out the bulk of digital TV.  No h.264 Level 4.1, so that cuts 
out the rest of digital TV and output from an HDPVR.  Lack of that, and 
VC1, means no Bluray playback either.  From the published information on 
the chip, it's still garbage requiring any content be transcoded down to 
low quality specifically for that device.

Now the A4 uses the same graphics chip as the GMA500, which is fully 
capable of Bluray playback, and the fact that they were even able to 
feed a 1080p video into it means Apple is intentionally restricting the 
capabilities of the hardware.  The XBMC guys are intentionally not 
saying anything about the capabilities of the device, until they get the 
code cleaned up and stabilized.  The user comments are all fairly 
unenlightened.  Between the several dozen forum topics, and comments on 
multiple news entries, I saw all of three posts that realized that there 
are differences in requirements between one 1080p video and another.

The discovery and implementation of a hidden video API available for iOS 
and OSX is certainly an impressive, and likely useful, accomplishment, 
but hold off applause on the ATV2 until someone actually documents what 
the device is capable of.