I am not sure that I understand. Would I be able to completely replace my Apple TV remote with my learning remote?

OSD overlay is gray when running XvMC, Color if Xv.

I run a 1080p display with 1080i XvMC decode no de-interlacing because my HDTV handles it just fine. I have run one-field and maybe kernel some time ago. I don't like kernel, motting artifacts. I'll be re-checking performance once I get back to frontend only, doing install refining and it's easier to check with front/backend.

Only MythTV on OSX using MacMini. Using OSX on AppleTV is futile, too many OS hacks to get OSX running (SSE2 vs SSE3). OSX only has GL so no XvMC and you need XvMX or something like it to handle 1080i.

A gray OSD when using XvMC does not bother me. I don't spend much time using the OSD, just when transiting to the EPG and that's in color.

The Apple IR remote command has a pre-data code which identifies the remote followed by the key code. Part of the pre-data is used for paring remotes to computers under OSX and is called the ID code (UID). When you pare a remote to the computer what you are doing is telling the computer to only listen to the remote with this UID. A certain key press on the Apple remote will increment the UID.

For example, the "menu" button on my remote has this for the IR code


The real pre-data is "0x87EE", the UID is "0x4A" and the key is "0x03"

If I increment the UID code, now I get this for the menu button


There are 256 possible UID codes. So 256 x 6 possible combinations that the AppleTV IR controller (all Apple IR controllers actually) will decode.

So what you can do it use the learning remote to learn six buttons. Then increment the ID code by pressing "Menu" and "Play/Pause", then learn another six buttons. rinse, repeat until you have enough buttons defined.

Now use irrecord to create your lirc.conf from the learning remote. Then you have the AppleTV IR controller responding to the learning remote which has more than six buttons.

After reading more with the links you provided (thanks!), I see what you doing. I have never done it, but I believe you can make MythTV change your resolution depending on the source video format and let your TV take care of all the deinterlacing. This would be ideal.


I was under the impression that you could run a MythTV OSX build using the installed OS on the AppleTV. Of course, you have to do a small amount of hacking to get it going. I run an OSX build on my iMac and it has "special sauce" in the code to handle the Mac video issues.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/In ... an_AppleTV


It does not bother me either, I was just wondering if that was still the case.

Another crazy question. Can the ATV net boot (PXE)? Or is there boot loader support for this? I'm guessing the answer is no.

The display resolution could be changed to match the video content. That would be ideal. I don't think myth supports this (could be wrong) but I think I saw some discussion a few months back on the myth lists.

The big problem is that the OSD, EPG and menu screens are all created based on the screen size when MFE is started. They then get cached. If the display resolution changed, there would have to be tracking with these too. I just wonder if the whole menu screen caching idea is obsolete. I'd sure like to see the memory impact reduced by having the menu screen rendered on the fly and not have lots of memory sucked down. Memory to self, hack a patch to render these on the fly and see what happens.

You can run OSX on the AppleTV, been there myself. It not too bad getting it running but you always have to watch out for OSX apps that have SSE3 code. Like DVDPlayer, lots of quicktime codecs, etc. I don't recommend it as it's too unstable because of the SSE2 vs SSE3 issue.

A PXE boot from atv-bootloader would be trivial to implement. Have not had time to add it yet;) I think I would spend more time setting up for testing a PXE boot than adding it to atv-bootloader. Features are demand driven right now.

It does, using xrandr. If setup, it changes it at video playback time, and then goes back to the default GUI resolution to display "Show Recordings", the menus, et c.

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Ok you have my attention, google be my friend "xrandr mythtv" and I'm headed into KM to try it.

xrandr does work however I get an ugly flash of colors when the resolution on my HDTV changes. But pretty cool. I did not know myth could do this.

I'll be looking into this some more, for 480i content, my TV does a much better job than myth/nvidia does for re-scaling the low res content onto a 1080p LCD panel.

I'm glad you are experimenting with this. Let us know what you find. I want to give it a shot with my regular KnoppMyth box too. My new Sony TV does a great job with deinterlacing and scaling too.

Update:

I should have something on the atv-bootloader wiki regarding installing KN5F27 on the AppleTV this weekend. I've resolved some install issues and discovered a method to enable IR and audio support without requiring a kernel rebuild. There will be two install methods. One using atv-bootloader on a USB pen drive to bootstrap a traditional KN5F27 install to the internal PATA. The other is more complicated and will result in eliminating the USB pen drive to bootstrap so everything is on the internal PATA disk.

Both methods will end up wiping the original contents (can be restored if backed up first) and are KM installs only. A dual boot install of both KM and the AppleTV OS on a single disk is complicated by KMs rigid partitioning structure. If an experienced Linux/KM user want's to pursue this offline, I can assist them.

Is there a way to boot from a pen drive in a "live" environment like you would with Knoppix? Would there be too much overhead on the USB drive?

Possible but not practical. There's only 256MB of ram. MythFrontEnd by itself is 300MB+ of virtual memory space. Add in Xorg and others and you are going to need swap somewhere. You could but on the USB flash drive but now write time is going to kill performance.

An external USB hard drive is a much better alternative.

I see your point.

With Flash drives increasing speed and all the talk of 20-30MB/sec read/write speeds I was hoping for a quieter solution.

I guess if Apple was making a great product we wouldn't be modding it.

The AppleTV is pretty silent as a frontend even with the internal PATA disk. I hardly notice it and it's sitting on to a speaker next to the HDTV (development position).


Possible to replace the internal PATA with a compact flash but why got to the trouble, it's pretty silent.