XBMC Questions

[tomegun]

I just received ATV as a going away gift and I installed XBMC. When I bring it up, the screen is small and I can't read it from where I'm sitting. Can someone tell me how to make adjustments to fix this?

My main question is: how does this software work better than regular ATV? I'm just looking for some examples because I'm new to this.

I have a MacBook, iMac and PC (desktop). My ATV is syncing with my iMac, but I would still like to stream content from my MacBook. I added the MacBook yesterday, but ATV isn't showing up in iTunes today. Is this normal?

 

[cdownton]

If I remember right there's a video setting screen and you have to adjust things there.

XBMC is not particularly better than the ATV interface, but it does allow you to watch pretty much whatever movie file formats you like, stream them from your computer etc. Apple only lets you watch the stuff Apple likes.

Boxee is now looking really good. I expect if you installed XBMC then you probably installed Boxee too. It's a really nice interface to some of the good internet TV websites (BBC iPlayer for me, probably Hulu for you)

 

[thomanjones]

...When I bring it up, the screen is small and I can't read it from where I'm sitting. Can someone tell me how to make adjustments to fix this?

...

Question: How do I get XBMC to show full screen rather than in windowed mode?
Answer: Settings -> Appearance -> Screen -> Resolution -> Full Screen

--

For adding media, what I did was install XBMC on my mac, then go into settings-> network -> Upnp -> Start upnp server -> Add sources -> [select the folders/drives that have all your videos] -> Name 'All Video'

This gave me a single upnp 'container' that contained all my video.

On the ATV, I went to settings -> network -> turn on upnp client

Then I went to Video on the ATV, and XBMC (my.mac.ip.add) was listed. Select it and viola! Saved myself a few hundred hours of handbraking video

I haven't made it much past that point, I just started this project last night after a few glasses of wine, so I apologize if my memory is kind of fuzzy.

Random tip: to 'right click' a folder/file, hold the 'menu' button on the ATV remote - that will let you set content type for scraping, or queue up an entire folder (currently using it to stream a folder with a few hundred kids shows - so awesome).