Step 5 Configuration README

NB: This page is currently a dumping ground for various comments and thoughts. It will cleaned up into some proper instructions eventually.

In recent years the running size of XBMC has increased, as have sizes of the binary driver blobs needed and the quantity of OS and XBMC features that users want to enable simultaneously. Everything requires RAM and CPU cycles and the AppleTV is stuck with 256MB and a slow single-core 1GHz CPU which is not really enough.

If you are thinking about running an "everything including the kitchen sink" configuration with USB wireless + DVB devices, a bluetooth mouse, Aeon Nox skin, with samba, avahi, the XBMC web GUI active at the same time it will run like crap on a mk1 AppleTV and honest advice would be to sell the box on eBay while they still command a good price and save up for something more modern with all-round better hardware.

If you are happy to run a "minimal" configuration, the AppleTV with a crystalhd card is still a great little device :)

The rough outline of a minimal configuration is:

Use Ethernet - because wireless devices are crap for streaming and require ram consuming binary drivers Use Confluence - it's the lightest and most reliable skin available for XBMC Disable menu sounds - they're annoying and require CPU cycles to play Disable fanart - not such a big issue now we force the fanart resolution to 720p, but this requires CPU cycles to display Disable "adjust refresh rate to match video" - most modern TVs provide good telecine conversion at 60Hz Disable "sync playback to display - as above Disable samba, cron, avahi and bluetooth services via the OE settings addon (leave only SSH enabled) Disable the OpenELEC settings addon (currently this requires a custom build) Disable the web-service in XBMC settings Don't connect mice/keyboards and other remote devices Don't connect DVB devices

Instead of ~93MB of RAM free at startup this should leave you with around 110MB free. This extra free RAM will reduce the swapping XBMC does when playback starts - and less swapping means a more instant-on playback experience. The dev team are looking at ways to free up more to improve things further.