[Hidd3nFury]

Alaska Revisited is my favourite skin so when I rushed out and bought an ATV2 for XBMC I was fairly disappointed to find that AR was barely usable with the first iOS build.

I have since installed the unofficial build with fixes for the transparency issues amongst others and the experience with AR is now much imporved.

What works:
- All the great new themes look great.
- The default home menu displays perfectly now. It's not super smooth but that's to be expected with the hardware.
- The other home views are super smooth. More so than any of the home menus in any of the other skins I have tried.
- All video/music views now work perfectly. Previously, for whatever reason none of the text would show in the majority of the views this is no longer a problem. The poster views are particularly snappy and all the views are most definitely usable, particularly with fanart disabled.

What doesn't work:
- Multi-images for default home dont seem to load, and I imagine the performance would be reduced considerably if they did.
- Banner.jpg and landscape.jpg don't work.

I realise that any shortcomings are likely due to the hardware/xbmc rather than the skin itself.

I thought I would post this in case anybody was considering the ATV2 with AR as the skin. I can recommend it as a very cheap solution so long as you dont want super smooth performance.

[WheresWaldo]

If I was to do things over again, these $99 ATV2 boxes with xbmc and AR would be my choice! Glad to see that most all the features are working.

[OwNeD162]

I'm running the official AR skin and it seems to be working quite well on my ATV2. A little bit slow (as expected) but definitely worth it.
Hopefully we'll start to see a few more 'lite' versions of skins now that ATV2 is proving to be quite a popular choice for XBMC users

[steppedup]

have you tried installing process lasso, and cranking up the priority of xbmc.exe, while lowering whatever else you have?

I did this so I could run sickbeard, and sab, and worked a treat.

[Cyzor]

Same here, XBMC with Alaska Revisited on the ATV2 is a combo made in heaven!

I first installed Alaska Revisited from the official XBMC.org repository. Only later I discovered that there is a much newer version available from the developers own repo. The version on the XBMC repo is 1.8.6. I since added the repo from this topic and downloaded version 2.7.6 from there. The boost in performance between version 1.8.6 and 2.7.6 is really noticeable. On the 1.x version the menu animations where workable but not smooth. Now with 2.x all menu animations are really smooth and comparable to the performance on a PC. Only the load times between menu's is longer.

Why is there such an old version on the XBMC repository? I think a lot of people are missing out now on a much better version of an already great skin.

[Hidd3nFury]

Same here, XBMC with Alaska Revisited on the ATV2 is a combo made in heaven!

I first installed Alaska Revisited from the official XBMC.org repository. Only later I discovered that there is a much newer version available from the developers own repo. The version on the XBMC repo is 1.8.6. I since added the repo from this topic and downloaded version 2.7.6 from there. The boost in performance between version 1.8.6 and 2.7.6 is really noticeable. On the 1.x version the menu animations where workable but not smooth. Now with 2.x all menu animations are really smooth and comparable to the performance on a PC. Only the load times between menu's is longer.

Why is there such an old version on the XBMC repository? I think a lot of people are missing out now on a much better version of an already great skin.

I believe Hitcher is waiting for the add-on updates problem to be sorted out before submitting the final revision of Alaska Revisited to the official repo.

As far as I know you can only get the original Alaska or the Alaska Revisited Mod from the official repo currently, both are considerably different from the latest AR release.

[Hitcher]

Yep, skin updates are on-hold in the official repo because of the problem.