XBMC for Mac OS X on Apple TV?

[berdelyi]

Assuming the Apple TV hardware is capable, is the intended plan to optimize XBMC so it can be run on Apple TV?

Secondly, assuming it can be run on the Apple TV, how would it be installed on a modified Apple TV with SSH enabled? How could XBMC be launched at boot instead of the default Apple TV interface (finder?)?

[bmfrosty]

AppleTV wouldn't be a terribly good platform as it's only a 1ghz processor. AppleTV gets away with this because they are using decode acceleration for specific encoders that are used by Apple. Therefore files converted to specifically use those codecs by users, or by the apple store work great, even at very high res and compression. Unfortunately other media isn't as lucky.

See AwkwardTV for some more information.

[berdelyi]

Is there any reason why XBMC on the AppleTV couldn't use the same decode acceleration?

I know DivX is very important for me, but could XBMC run similar codec and resolution support with the same performance?

I'm primarily interested in knowing what's required for something like this to replace the Finder.app on startup and have a completely new interface and media engine for the Apple TV.

[rodalpho]

Sure it could, if someone coded them. But there's no real opensource GPU offloading available for video codecs other than MPEG2. More information is in the wiki. Alternatively I guess they could hook into quicktime the same way that XBMC/linux hooks into mplayer, but that's a dirty hack.

All of that stuff won't matter in time. CPU prices continue to drop every year, ffmpeg continues with very active development, and in 2010 the cheapest circuit city $200 throwaway piece of crap grandma computer will have enough power to play 1080p completely in software. And (looking at the forum) the cheapest mac mini too.

[zeolc]

XBMC on a mac mini would be a much more powerful solution...