XBMC on ATV2 Second Impressions
I have been using XBMC on ATV2 now for a just over a month as the media centre for the main bedroom and it is proving to be well worth the £101 or $99 (Grrrr) for the hardware. Since the initial release Greenpois0n has released an un-tethered Jailbreak. Which makes life a lot easier; previously you would have to boot the ATV2 whilst it was hooked up to your laptop. Which when doing your initial configuration would be a right PITA.
There are still a couple of issues of note. The wifi didn’t work for me at all after the jailbreak which I need as have no Ethernet in the bedroom. This was actually easily fixed by ssh on the ATV2 and running the following:
The overall UI isn't completely optimised for the platform yet, so I slightly sluggish, though completely usable, I'm probably a bit hyper sensitive to this as my Media centre in the lounge it completely overkill for what its doing :).
XBMC doesn't receive command from the ATV2 remote correctly when you hold a button down. All this effectively means is you need to repeatedly hammer up or down whilst browsing through large libraries.
One of the very cool features (there are thousands of cool features) with XBMC with the Dharma release is you can move your library database of the media centre on to a central mysql server. What this effectively means is you can have multiple media centres sharing the same library, this give you a number of advantages:
This also works for music but my collection is frankly a mess, so am still browsing the files rather than by ID3 tags.
All in all im really really impressed with how well XBMC runs on what is a mobile phone with out a screen on it, the fact that you can only output in 720p like i said before is only an issue if you actually have a 720p screen (madness!). Go get yours today.
There are still a couple of issues of note. The wifi didn’t work for me at all after the jailbreak which I need as have no Ethernet in the bedroom. This was actually easily fixed by ssh on the ATV2 and running the following:
apt-get update
apt-get remove com.nito.nitotv
apt-get install com.nito.nitotv
killall AppleTVThe overall UI isn't completely optimised for the platform yet, so I slightly sluggish, though completely usable, I'm probably a bit hyper sensitive to this as my Media centre in the lounge it completely overkill for what its doing :).
XBMC doesn't receive command from the ATV2 remote correctly when you hold a button down. All this effectively means is you need to repeatedly hammer up or down whilst browsing through large libraries.
One of the very cool features (there are thousands of cool features) with XBMC with the Dharma release is you can move your library database of the media centre on to a central mysql server. What this effectively means is you can have multiple media centres sharing the same library, this give you a number of advantages:
- You will only need to scan your library once each time you add new content
- If you alter the video / audio settings on how a video is displayed, your preferences are saved in the library and will play back as you set on any media centre connected to the library
- changes the default language track
- changing the subtitles
- changing the aspect ratio etc etc....
This also works for music but my collection is frankly a mess, so am still browsing the files rather than by ID3 tags.
All in all im really really impressed with how well XBMC runs on what is a mobile phone with out a screen on it, the fact that you can only output in 720p like i said before is only an issue if you actually have a 720p screen (madness!). Go get yours today.
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