Dave’s Happy Place

After several hundred downloads of version 1.0 of the Photeon (Photo + AEON) backdrops/backgrounds for the XBMC Media Center AEON skin, a bigger, better, brighter version 1.1 is now available for download.

Download Photeon Backgrounds version 1.1

If you download and use the backgrounds please leave a comment. I’d love to know what people think of them or what could be improved!

Movies - original by Jean-Luc ST-Hilaire (clasixart) of Quebec, Canada.

TV Shows - original by Miroslav Sárička (v_hujer) of Prievidza, Slovakia.

Clips - original by Melanie Kuipers ** (yum) of Germany.

Pictures - original by Piotr Lewandowski ** (LeWy2005) of Gdynia, Pomorskie, Poland.

Music - original by Bart Noszka (noszki) of Dabrowa, Slaskie, Poland.

Games - original by Stephen Davies (steved_np3) of the UK.

Arcade - original by Sas Van Veen ** (xtrapink) of the Netherlands.

Apps - original by Brian Lary (blary54) of the United States.

Weather - original by G Schouten de Jel (gabriel77) of Den Haag, Z-H, Netherlands.

Settings - original by Giovanni Miniato (desmox) of Italy.

Extras - originals by GLS (glspro5) of Argentina, and Laura Shreck (Columbine) of the United States.

The backgrounds are all 720p BMP images so will work with both original XBox hardware and Linux/Windows HTPC solutions without any rescaling.

Legal Stuff

All images in the Photeon series of backgrounds were obtained from stock.xchng, a free stock photo site, and then modified as necessary by David Teirney.

All images remain protected by the original terms and conditions of stock.xchng. Please respect the original license conditions as also noted in the enclosed License.txt file.

Changes from 1.0

• Added “Apps” image.
• Added “Arcade” image.
• Added “Clips” image.
• Added “Extras” images.
• Added “Games” image.
• Changed “Settings” image.
• Removed the “TV Shows” image and replaced with the old “Live TV” image.
• Repositioned the existing version 1.0 images to better work with the Showcase view and the AEON menu bar.
• Cleaned the close-up images to remove unsightly artifacts like small hairs and other imperfections that were blatantly obvious when blown up to 46+ inches on an HD TV.
• Altered the color curves for most images so they are more consistent across the set of images.

Installation

Download the photeon-backgrounds-1.1.zip file (18.2 MB) and follow the instructions within the enclosed Readme.txt file.

The download is hosted by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) so tell all your friends as it’s hardly costing anything to host and share this with everyone.

For a while I’ve known that getting the original XBox to play HD content was going to be a big ask. Plenty of places have said it just won’t happen.

Today I tested a 720p H264 movie that is freely available for download called Big Buck Bunny.

With debug information turned on there was still plenty of memory free (~20Mb) but the CPU spiked to 100% and playback was a miserable 17fps. The sound was playing fine, but the video was very laggy.

In the debug log I was very amused to see the following:

16:39:31 M: 18128896 DEBUG: msg:
************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************
Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
- Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
- Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
- Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
- Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts, e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
- Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
- Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
- Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

It’s very saddening to see that the Xbox has almost come to the end of it’s usefulness.

I could look at hooking in some of the mplayer options to try and help the CPU out but it really looks like its time to start putting together a new Linux HTPC now that HD TV is available in New Zealand via DVB-T.