XBMC on Apple TV 2: The Good and Bad So Far

I decided to kick my Popcorn Hour to the curb for the sake of a fancy gui that might be easier for the family to operate.  With oogling eyes I picked up a new Apple TV and brought it home.  It took me about 4 times before I was able  to Jailbreak it with Green Poison.  I installed the anti Apple Update Nag program first and then tried to install XBMC, which failed twice.  With more internet searching I found out how to go in and install via ssh, which I did with one I covered in fear.  Presto, it worked.  XBMC was on the list of things I could choose from the main menu.  But I couldn't stream or find anything from my network because of  a bug in it causes you to restart first. 

Then I got the black screen.  Arghh!  I have this committed to memory:  login as root, password alpine, killall AppleTV.  And everything goes hunky dory again, remember that kids, you'll need it.  All my dvd backups as MKV or xvid or avi's all played great.  Yes, yes, yes.  But high def, hahaha that's another story.

Oh, you've read about how it will play 1080p content, etc, but that, in my experience, was a little short on substance.  It won't play my hd caps from HD PVR that I did buy at least without reencoding them.  Nightmare, let me tell you.  I finally had to hook up the Popcorn Hour that I luckily hadn't ebayed yet to see if I was going nuts.  I tried streaming from my NAS and two other computers until I reencoded for Apple TV 2 on Handbrake and on the Arcsoft software that comes with the HD PVR.  Now it works, 6 to 13 hours later on my 5 year old computer after reencoding. 

Is it cool, XBMC on the Apple TV 2?  Yes, very.  Is it underpowered?  Yes, very.