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Comment by sielskr | Hacker News Reader

This promises to remove the only obstacle to my spending $99 on an Apple TV box, namely, my fear of being locked into Apple's content distribution system.

Will someone unaffiliated with the project please describe their experiences with using this software to watch mp4s of movies? Any restrictions or gotchas?

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I saw an independant report stating that 1080p had minor stutters. Don't know if that's fixable. This is an early release but on the other hand they're pushing beyond the boundaries of what the hardware is designed for.

I'm also not sure what profiles it supports. Apple's software specs says Main Profile only, but they sometimes software restrict their hardware to keep support homogeneous across their lines (this appears to be the case for the 1080 support, they're just calling Apple's code).

If you wait about 6 months, Apple will most likely release rev. 2 of the ARM based AppleTV, which is rumored to contain the A5 processor, which is based on ARM's dual-core design A9 architecture, and is supposed to be fully capable of hardware accelerated 1080p playback.

The newer hardware should be much more future-proof. It remains to be seen whether it will be easily jailbroken, or whether Apple will get tougher with security.

apple tv plain works fine with mp4.... but I'm going to try this with mkv files and all other kinds of stuff this weekend

Please let us know.

Seeking is slightly painful with some mkv files for me (at least over Samba - Which was expected given it's 10/100 ethernet), but in generally all the files I've tried (mostly 720p) have played back perfectly.

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