Full Blu-ray on the ATV / Other Apple Hardware (without dropping frames)

[VoR]

http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broadcom-crystal-hd-its-magic/#comments

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzg0OQ

Interesting that this great oss project has spawned from broadcom, which doesn't (didn't) have the best track record with linux et al.

I think this is something that people have been waiting for a long time - great job from everyone involved.

Maybe one day apple will help out and produce some decent hardware/software combinations (or just an API?....), especially in the modern media related field - but I guess they can just rest, again - someone else has done it for them, again.

 

[heliocentric]

can this improve playback while using the apple software on atv or do u have to be in xmbc?

 

[VoR]

Well, the software is completely oss, so I'm sure it'll shortly be rolled into projects such as ffmpeg - dropping cpu usage in your favourite apps to pretty much nothing.
It won't accelerate apple's propitiatory software out of the box. I'm unaware how some of the atv hacks work (quite possible they're using open source video decoders that will be able to take advantage of this hardware in the future).
If I had an ATV I wouldn't be running apple's rather limited software, there's some great alternatives out there.

 

[heliocentric]

Well, the software is completely oss, so I'm sure it'll shortly be rolled into projects such as ffmpeg - dropping cpu usage in your favourite apps to pretty much nothing.
It won't accelerate apple's propitiatory software out of the box. I'm unaware how some of the atv hacks work (quite possible they're using open source video decoders that will be able to take advantage of this hardware in the future).
If I had an ATV I wouldn't be running apple's rather limited software, there's some great alternatives out there.

i like the way it syncs with my itunes with apples software though and has all my mp4 tagging. would be good if it worked with apples software then i wouldnt have to worry about my bluray 720p birates being to high

 

[VoR]

Of course, each to their own Personally I dislike itunes and find that there's many great alternatives to quality meta tagging and media playback.

Apple have not exposed any api's for decoding hd media in the atv or even osx, so I can't really see them jumping to support 3rd party hardware (especially devices that require you to open up the machine).

I think that the sort of people that might be buying a pci-e decoder card are the type that would have no problems experimenting with different (ie. non-apple) software solutions. Personally, I use xbmc on my media centre machine - it's requires a little bit of reading and tinkering to set up (unlike most apple software) but I feel that the results are well worth it.