HD Final Notes

After playing with AVC decoding on different hardware here is what I have to say about it

• XBOX ($200 worth of Pentium III with 64 DDR on 133MHz FSB living in my living-room since 2003) is powerful enough to do 640x480 H264 encoded at 600-750Kbps with recent builds of x264 (surprisingly enough it drops too many frames on L’épopé en Amérique encoded in January). Yeah, it drops some frames, but it is not a biggie. XBOX cannot do anything bigger then 480p SD, but supposedly should decode 5.1 AAC into DTS and output to TOSLINK (or is it - do test).
  XBMC (or mplayer and thus Apple TV, 64-bit Vista and so on) cannot play drv-ms until this changes make it into mplayer build, but could or couldn’t play? MPEG wrapped HDTV, though this is of little practical use since the files are huge and would need to be AVC-transcoded anyway.
  XBOX DVD-ROM doesn’t like my DVD media (recognize but fails to mount I guess), but plays pressed DVDs just fine.
  With some coding of XBMC extensions I could make it do everything I need from online media and more. Namely, as it is my extension plays my RSS feeds and all I have to do is
  • modify my extension a bit to load a categorized list of my RSS from a server… May be TVTonic server?
  • implement “add to favorites” to add a link to my RSS
  • Figure out how to make launching extensions (and especially my extension) more straightforward which would imply looking at how skins are implemented… Say modify XBOX360 skin to have an extra tab for my extension…
  All in all, XBOX is the best and cheapest solution as long as it is attached to SD TV-set, but even with HD panel with HD kit it would upconvert 420p to 720p or 1080i. Today and tomorrow this is where we are with HD anyway.
• Apple TV ($250-$300 worth of 1GHz Dothan, 256 DDR2, 64MB GPU on 400MHz FSB) with hacks would play non-Apple media and samba mount it. However to this day there is no RSS plugin that would stream the media off the Internet, so video feeds first need to be downloaded on a server and then streamed to Apple TV (as Apple intended). Writing a plugin means some OSX programming (plugins are bundles for Apple TV Finder.app). It is questionable if this plugin would be written since most are happy storing there stuff on Mac and making it available thru iTunes and the same goes for pictures, music, etc. So if I want Apple TV the way I used to enjoying my media I would have to write everything myself.
  Is it worth it? It might have been if Apple TV
  • was powerful enough to play ATSC HDTV
  • was powerful enough to play 1080p H264
  But it ain’t. So yeah, Apple TV is cool, but it is more expensive and for extra $100 vs. XBOX you would get half of functionality (as of today), twice amount of work to make it usable and at the end the best it could do (vs. XBOX that is) is to play 720p. Frankly there is more – Apple TV would pass-thru Dolby Pro Logic for receiver to decode. Cool! Means that Apple TV would play 720p HD mp4 with 5.1 AAC on Dolby Pro Logic receiver the same as DVD player would play AC3 on Dolby Digital receiver. But ain’t XBOX is capable to software decode 5.1 AAC into DTS and output to Dolby Digital receiver? If XBMC could do that we are back to 480p vs. 720p and I am skeptical if Apple TV is truly capable to do 720p AVC.
  Bottom line is the same as 9 months ago – until version 2.0 Apple TV is useless and knowing that Apple has no resources to do anything but iPhone, I am skeptical Apple TV 2.0 is coming any time soon.
• 1.6GHz Dothan, 32MB GPU on 400MHz FSB is fine for 720p AVC, but is not capable of 1080p. It is hosed decoding ATSC HDTV and Microsoft Media Center (as in MCE2005 or Vista) is not even tuning to the channel.
• 1.6GHz Yonah, 32MB? shared GPU on 667MHz FSB is OK for 1080p despite that Direct Show is unable to multi-thread decoding. Cannot really tell if frames are dropped at 1080p, but to be safe let’s say more then 1.6GHz Yonah is needed for 1080p. There is also no problem watching 1080i ATSC, however this needs a bit more testing.

Overall, HD is not here yet on decoding side either, so XBOX still is the best option. Apple TV is not worth the money because it is marginally better (from functionality perspective) then good old XBOX, but might be interesting from writing missing plug-ins perspective. From all hardware available today it is still MacMini that makes sense as a future Media Center, but with no updates in a year (still being Yonah when Intel is almost done with next product life-cycle) and at the same price MacMini is even more expensive at $600 and might not do everything that is expected from it. May be with the release of Leopard they would update MacMini, but rumors are that they rather drop it. Then at least may be they would drop the price on the old and bundle it with FrontRow 2.0 so that it wouldn’t have to be copied from Apple TV… but then again it would be not only $500+ for a MacMini, but more $$$ for a flat panel, and it is not clear if and how MacMini output Dolby Pro Logic or 5.1 in general… HD is not here yet, but close…