Can a USB hard drive be attached to ATV2 (micro USB to micro USB cable) and be accessed by XBMC or does the library have to be networked?
I have it on my Apple TV 1. It looks nice but doesn't seem to do a lot, is it supposed to find my iTunes library????? I use Hand brake to rip content so that it is Apple TV compatible, so I guess it's just not for me. Boxee is cool though!
Slightly off topic but very relevant...
Does anyone know if the tethered jailbreak means tethered during a full boot from a complete power off at the mains startup
or
tethered when booting from standby???
If its from standby then i think i will wait until some nice people discover an untethered jailbreak for my appletv2... having to turn on my laptop and connect the appletv everytime i wanna use it kinda defeats the purpose... i would be better just running xbmc from my laptop connected to my tv!
Plex requires everything to be converted xbmc doesnt. this is by far better
Respectfully, it doesn't. If the hardware cannot output the video in it's native format, then it gets transcoded on the fly. Example, if I'm viewing on another computer, it's going to be full resolution full everything. But if viewed on a appletv or iphone, ipad, ipod... it will transcode it to the max output of that device. Edit: Which is no different from how the new XMBC is doing it. As stated above, the AppleTV cannot output in 1080, as of now, but Firecore is working on that one.
As far as the iOS app, it's not just a remote, it can stream over wifi/3g any music and/or movies/ plex app's that you want. I've shown coworkers it and it has started streaming my movies/shows faster (on my iphone 4) than the netflix app that my coworker had on his iPhone 4.
At the end of the day, to each his own, but the plex media server in .9 is absolutely amazing. There's a reason that LG is using it to power all their Smart TV's and bluray players. By powering, I mean their network streaming capability.
The only difference is that with XBMC the transcoding part happens on ATV and not on the host machine. Depending on what profile XBMC uses, it is likely to result in higher quality and less buffering problems than the model that Plex uses for iOS devices, especially when PMS is running on a less capable Mac Minis. As far as I understand it, Plex transcodes HD files into 1.5Mbps, while XBMC will reduce the resolution but keep the quality close to original...
That's very interesting that XMBC does transcoding on the client side. I can only speak for my iPhone for Plex's iOS capability but I checked my settings and it streams 2Mbps. I may take a look at XMBC, but I love what Plex has does w/ their media server, so it'll be hard for me to switch, but always gota keep an open mind.
Can anyone confirm whether this will work with streaming from a NAS?
Wouldn't there be some transcoding required for filetypes that can't be played natively on the ATV2? Can a NAS do this?
yes! Just add the NAS as a network share.
No transcoding needed. XBMC will decode it all!
As soon as Plex gets on the bandwagon I'll be getting one of these.