Originally Posted by dtube

So far it's running ok on my atv2.
I haven't messed around with add-ons. The only one i tried was youtube add-ons which seemed to be ok.
I'm able to connect to my samba share to playback an mkv without problem (avatar 1080p). Although it played well but i can tell that it is not as smooth as my ATV1 with the HD Decoder. Also, it cannot play ISO directly yet where xbmc on my ATV1 can.

By no mean, i am very excited that XBMC is now on ATV2

LOL! Avatar...

Playback's been great - head to head with my ATV1 everything is flush. Admittedly, my ATV1 has more features, but the ATV2 is quickly catching up...

Originally Posted by jh756

Admittedly, my ATV1 has more features, but the ATV2 is quickly catching up...

Sorry to put a damper on things, but it will never catch up. The ATV1 had the advantage of being based on OS X, which meant all the resources of that OS can be used toward the ATV1, but the same is not true of the ATV2.

Originally Posted by gbooker

Sorry to put a damper on things, but it will never catch up. The ATV1 had the advantage of being based on OS X, which meant all the resources of that OS can be used toward the ATV1, but the same is not true of the ATV2.

The ATV1 will never beat the $88 price tag on the ATV2...

Also, installing OS X (or Linux...) on the ATV1 is something reserved for the extremely savvy & adventurous - most people will never do this. As for as what you can do with the ATV1 running the original software, the ATV2 is quickly filling the gaps.

Originally Posted by jh756

Also, installing OS X (or Linux...) on the ATV1 is something reserved for the extremely savvy & adventurous - most people will never do this.

That's not what I was talking about; I was talking about copying binaries from OS X to the ATV.

Originally Posted by jh756

As for as what you can do with the ATV1 running the original software, the ATV2 is quickly filling the gaps.

We have very very different definitions of quickly. The ATV1 was playing divx files from it's own hard drive on day 1. ATV2 took much longer to achieve that feat. The reason the ATV1 was so much faster is that it could run programs already compiled for OS X, such as Perian.

So, remaining gaps that I'll outline (apologies if any of these have actually been done and I just don't know about them):
USB external disk support
AFP file sharing
Ability to run daemon like programs such as rtorrent or sabnzbd
ease of development of small programs to be executed via crontab (by ease, I mean that no setup is required for setting up the dev environment aside form installing Xcode)

These are things I use on ATV1 every single day, and ATV2 cannot do them. Being iOS based instead of OS X based brings a considerable barrier to many of these developments.

I'm not trying to diminish the accomplishment of getting XBMC running on ATV2, but rather in bringing to light the fact that it wasn't easy. While the ATV2 is just now starting to cross the threshold of being useful, it's hardly "quickly filling the gaps."

This thread is rapidly getting off topic. Can we stay focused on XBMC and how it works on iOS devices versus XBMC on other platforms. If we want an ATV1 versus ATV2 thread, i'm happy to move some of the posts here to a separate thread.

The RTMP and MMS streaming issue I mentioned earlier is acknowledged as a bug/problem. A list of known issues with XBMC for iOS/ATV2 is here http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91581

One other thing to note, only h.264 video is hardware accelerated. It *should* be possible to accelerate mpeg4-part2 video (xvid/divx) also but that is not yet working.

WMV and VC-1 video is software decoded so you should see little difference to using VLC for playing videos in these formats. No one knows if the hw decode has support for these codecs (or if it does, that this can be exposed via Apple's hw video decode API)

Agreed - this is a place for discussion of XBMC on the ATV2 - XBMC for other devices such as the ATV1 and iPad should be held in the proper forum (i.e. not the Apple TV 2 forum...).

I am also having a problem with getting it recognize/find my External HD on the wireless. i didn't find any help in my searching so far, and i didn't see anything that said i needed to install a part of it on my Mac (like Plex). Although i like the settings in it i have found. very clean program overall.

I also have some problems with streaming video from the addons. I tried NRK, TV3 and some other addons, but i get the protocol error message. Though YouTube did work.
Though streaming from linux sambaserver works as good as with my old XBOX with XBMC.
Also noticed that Remote on my iPad didnt work quite well with XBMC on ATV2. But i guess it will soon.

Yeah, the add-ons that aren't published by XBMC are kind of hit and miss. I got these to work for me:

Tool-assisted Superplays
Jupiter Broadcasting
PreviewNetworks Video Trailers
Academic Earth

As well as a few of the audio add-ons & programs like GMail checker. I haven't installed all add-ons myself, so I'm sure there are more that are working.

You may want to check this thread to see which features are working: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91581

I'm able to share my 1Tb external over my windows network, as well as access SMB shares on my Linux machine - I'm fairly sure that if you have Samba installed & configured on your Mac you should be able to access the shares. It should be as easy as including the path to your external drive in your smb.conf file (assuming you don't have a GUI for Samba on OS X).

Originally Posted by goxboxlive

I also have some problems with streaming video from the addons. I tried NRK, TV3 and some other addons, but i get the protocol error message. Though YouTube did work.

As far as I know Youtube's streams are served via http. Other streams often use other protocols for streaming (eg RTMP and MMS) this is why some video plugins work and others don't

Originally Posted by goxboxlive

Also noticed that Remote on my iPad didnt work quite well with XBMC on ATV2. But i guess it will soon.

The remote apps rely on XBMC's inbuilt web server - which is disabled in this first 1.0 version

webserver disabled (so xbmc remote apps for smartphones / ipod touch, or anything else dependant on the web server will not currently work)

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91581