Kodi v5.95.4 build for AppleTV

[Soli]

Disregarding any bugs or contradictions in the EDID itself, the latest Nvidia legacy 304.125 driver supports all refreshrates properly out of the box.. Well almost; the supposed 23.976hz is closer to 23,971hz. If a more exact 23,976hz mode is important to you, then you can always add the required modeline to xorg.conf yourself. (It certainly doesn't hurt, except that some tvs are more likely to lose their sync once in a while with custom modelines...even if the custom modeline is more accurate)

[cconur]

Dear @chewitt, first of all, congrats for this fantastic job and many thanks for sharing it.
I have tested it and looks really great. I have only found this issue:
The AirPlay service is not working at all, since my iOS devices doesn't find Kodi as airplay output...
This is what I get regarding airplay in the log file...
OpenELEC:~/.kodi/temp # grep -i airplay kodi.log
19:02:39 T:2654104384 NOTICE: Thread AirPlayServer start, auto delete: false
19:11:08 T:2746424128 NOTICE: Thread AirPlayServer start, auto delete: false
Any tip to try to investigate the problem to fix it??
Many thanks in advance!

[redhulk]

Love the build have put it on 2 of my 3 atv only problem I have come across is that if it is wired Ethernet works great .I use wireless at my home and have trouble connecting have to try 3 or 4 times than the box freez and non responsive after about 4 or 5 min .it has done this with 2 different boxes 3 times fresh installs made sure wireless was checked in openelec settings and unchecked wired can you please help

[chewitt]

@iLuvRaspberries: http://chewitt.openelec.tv/xorg.chewitt <= example of xorg.conf with EDID modes disabled and "more accurate" modes set manually after several boring hours reading the xorg debug output from my 2008-9 era Samsung LCD and messing about (several years ago). From fuzzy memory an increment of X.XXX1 in the refresh rate Hz parameter (e.g. 74.1756 in the 23.976 mode) results in an XX.XXXX8 change in the xrandr output so you cannot get them exact. The problem is caused by nvidia using weird maths (different base?) in their calculations; I found an explanation that I didn't understand in the nvidia forums once. Using that xorg I get the modes shown below, and with Adjust Refresh set I will see 1-2 max resync corrections (and often none) over the length of a 2-hour movie once initial drops that happen at playback start are done.

Code:

<output name="HDMI-0" connected="true" w="1920" h="1080" x="0" y="0" crtc="0" wmm="160" hmm="90">
<mode id="0x1bd" name="800x600" w="800" h="600" hz="60.31654" current="false" preferred="true"/>
<mode id="0x1be" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="60.00000" current="true" preferred="false"/>
<mode id="0x1bf" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="59.94020" current="false" preferred="false"/>
<mode id="0x1c0" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="50.00000" current="false" preferred="false"/>
<mode id="0x1c1" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="29.97010" current="false" preferred="false"/>
<mode id="0x1c2" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="25.00000" current="false" preferred="false"/>
<mode id="0x1c3" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="24.00000" current="false" preferred="false"/>
<mode id="0x1c4" name="1920x1080" w="1920" h="1080" hz="23.97608" current="false" preferred="false"/>
</output>

[chewitt]

The AirPlay service is not working at all, since my iOS devices doesn't find Kodi as airplay output...

You will need to re-enable the Avahi service in OE settings; it is disabled in the "out of box" config to save RAM. Then turn Airplay ON in Kodi settings and set the iOS 8+ config if (probably) required. The Kodi Airplay feature works 'okay' for me on a much more powerful Xtreamer Ultra2 box; good but it's never been what I would call 100% reliable. I don't consider this to be a core feature of these AppleTV builds and I didn't spend any time testing this. I would expect performance/behaviour to be worse than the Xtreamer box as it requires CPU to work smoothly and we're not blessed with much in that area.

[chewitt]

Love the build have put it on 2 of my 3 atv only problem I have come across is that if it is wired Ethernet works great .I use wireless at my home and have trouble connecting have to try 3 or 4 times than the box freez and non responsive after about 4 or 5 min .it has done this with 2 different boxes 3 times fresh installs made sure wireless was checked in openelec settings and unchecked wired can you please help

This build contains some additional patches for the broadcom driver that may solve the problem; although in the absence of any log evidence (some dmesg output would be nice - there's probably log spew there from the driver) I have no firm idea what the problem is. The file needs to be unzipped to .tar format before updating:

http://chewitt.openelec.tv/appletv-test/...5.4.tar.gz

[chewitt]

@Soli: playing about with remotes will be challenging for me at the moment as my 2-year old son "ate" mine over the weekend. It has been sucked and saliva'd to death and I need to find a local shop that sells them

[kraqh3d]

Here's a full account of my experience with this build... For background, I have two ATV's running your build -- one has a '12, the other has a '15. Both are wired and running off USB sticks.

The one with the '15 is sitting in my toy collection, mostly collecting dust these days, but still connected via an HDMI switch. (And I have lots of toys.) I tried OE on this one first because I expected HDMI would just work out of the box and it did. It came right up no problem. I later applied your update and then installed a bunch of addons to complete things.

Once I had that one the way I like it with some custom addons, and keymaps, and my custom atvclient running, I made simply copied that stick. I dd'ed it into an image, mounted it so I could delete guisettings.xml, upnpserver.xml and change the hostname in oe_settings.xml, and then wrote it out to another stick. I am happy to tell you that the copy booted straight away on the ATV connected to the old plasma via component. I like that. I'm tired of tinkering. I've got too many science projects. I don't need another one. Hmm, you know what, now that I think about it, I made one other change on the original stick. Since I was preparing to run it on the plasma, I copied xorg.conf to .config and changed setting HDStandard to 720p, but that's it.

The '12 is attached to the plasma and its where I did my testing. I only have maybe 20 or so 1080p videos ranging from 10 to 25 GB that I keep around for comparison purposes. (I tended to stay away from them for size and due to the annoyances with the ATV.) So I played a few of these movies, each for about 30 minutes a pop, leaving the codec info dialog up. I really wasn't watching the TV all the time however. I was listening and peaking up every once and while. The test will be trying to play a movie for the kids, maybe Avatar. They are the real critics

The plasma only accepts 720p60 (hence the xorg change) and I'm only outputting with 2-channel audio. I'd say the performance is on par if not a bit better than my previous version of Helix running on my less than stock version of CB2. It's surprisingly responsive even running from USB stick. I got the black screen syndrome for all but one 1080p video. Hitting back fixed every time. One video was like my previous experience where it would start in a low frame rate with non stop drops, and an ever increasing a/v sync error if you watched the codec info screen. The same workaround applied though, hit back and let it start over. This worked in the past too. I kind of think the black screen is better. It's less annoying that the stuttery image. (I always contemplated trying to write a simple service addon to try to detect this and hit back automatically after 5 seconds to restart the video but I never did it.) There were some spots where CPU hit 100% but I had expected that. The biggest difference is the startup time for 1080p videos is bit longer than it was before.

I really didn't get to play much with the other one with the '15 in it. I may install to hard drive this weekend and test after that. I was just excited to be able to see my current MySQL database with the added movies and current watched status since I switched off the ATV.

I'm not sure what else could be done to improve the performance. The ATV is really getting pushed to its limit. If you have some crazy ideas you want to try, I'm game. And I've got one of each card so I can compare the effectiveness with both.

[Soli]

@chewitt
Good thing he didn't swallow the remote :S

And thanks for the 59.94hz modeline. It seems to be a little more accurate than the one that comes ootb with the nvidia driver (which is 59.93939hz) Not that it matters much since I don't tape reruns of the bold and the beautiful (and if I did, it would be in 50hz since I'm in Europe) B)

Some tidbits for those who are curious: playing 23.976fps (some movies have an even more exact fps of 23.97602fps) over 24 will give you an extra frame each 41seconds.
The Nvidia GPU can get pretty close @ 23.97606hz. That means a frame doubling each 416 minutes, which should be enough to last through whatever movie without any microstutter. That's the theory at least The sound will drift a little too. At the end of a 3 hour movie, it would have drifted about 18ms, which is less than half a frame.

[chewitt]

@kraqh3d: one thing I noticed in testing USB boot is that if the internal HDD has a swap partition it will be found and used in preference to the swap partition created on the USB stick; which helps considerably. I'm going to go back and spend some time with the BCM970012 card to see if we can "optimise" the build for the older card. The only thing I can think of that can really be tweaked is the network cache settings though. I think the difference is more down to code paths through Kodi and the driver and it may be that the newer cards are simply less affected by overall Kodi progression.