Fully aware that there are some older threads in this matter.
Wanted to re-raise the question given the fact that VLC has found a way to bring its player back to the IOS - following opensource policies (and from what I see online not pissing off the community).
Any chance to follow their approach and bring XBMC to non-jailbroken devices? Appreciate not spamming this thread with comments about how stupid and restrictive Apple is and sorts like that.
Someone did this and called it AVMC. They had to cut a lot out to get it approved, and it's horrible, even on an iPad 4. Videos stutter, there are no add-ons, and if you have to pay a dollar then you should look at OPlayer or nPlayer, which are very good AppStore video players (plays all sorts of formats).
Keep in mind, XBMC not being in the iOS App Store has nothing to do with the open source license XBMC uses. The same is true for VLC. VLC used GPL v2, which does not conflict with the iOS App Store. However, one non-core VLC developer decided to be a dick and force his views on the rest of the world by telling Apple that it there was an issue. Apple didn't want to open Pandora's box, so they just removed the whole thing and stuck their head in the sand. There are tons of GPL v2 software on the iOS App Store to this day.
This left the other VLC developers with very limited options, so they went and relicensed VLC, which also helps them out in other non-App Store issues. It's a really cool story about how they went and did this. They actually contacted nearly everyone who ever developed for VLC to get them to agree to a second license.
XBMC is not in the iOS App Store because we use private APIs and things like add-ons (what Apple considers to be downloadable code that is accessed outside of the App Store), among several other things (such as being able to play AC3 and DTS audio tracks). Making a version of XBMC that would comply with the iOS App Store would be garbage, and we don't want anything to do with such garbage. Other people are free to try, like the AVMC guy did, but you'll quickly find out that it really is garbage.
Personally, I have no issue with the iOS App Store. It's just that you can't have "real" XBMC on it.
Also, the AVMC guy refuses to publish his source code, so he is violating the GPL. Plus, he forgot to disable AC3 audio support, since he didn't pay for a license for it. Unless he does those two things (and a few others, I think) then he'll be taken off the iOS App Store.
(2013-07-20, 07:42)Ned Scott Wrote: [ -> ]Personally, I have no issue with the iOS App Store. It's just that you can't have "real" XBMC on it.
Got it, thanks for the quick reply and comprehensive answer. Don't think I want to support the AVMC person as long as he is violating the license.
Maybe someone else will take up the challenge. I don't mind too much about missing add-ons. Let's see what the future will bring about a non-addon XBMC.
In the short-term, I will probably wait until VLC allows adding SMB drives and then I give this a try on my ipad.
It is not about someone else will take up the challenge... Any XBMC in the apple IOS store would be unable to play ANY video content except SD content making it useless for anything except music. When I started the port to ATV2/iOS years ago, the pivotal factor was tapping into the private APIs for hardware video decode. If I could not solve that (which I did), then this port would have died on the vine and XBMC on ATV2/iOS would not exist today.
Dyloading and user installs of addons are a side issue.
(2013-07-21, 06:22)davilla Wrote: [ -> ]It is not about someone else will take up the challenge... Any XBMC in the apple IOS store would be unable to play ANY video content except SD content making it useless for anything except music. When I started the port to ATV2/iOS years ago, the pivotal factor was tapping into the private APIs for hardware video decode. If I could not solve that (which I did), then this port would have died on the vine and XBMC on ATV2/iOS would not exist today.
Dyloading and user installs of addons are a side issue.
Thanks, this does not sound too promising that a non-jailbroken IOS version will ever see the light.
Out of curiosity - how does VLC manage to play HD content?
steve1977 Wrote: [ -> ]Out of curiosity - how does VLC manage to play HD content?
It doesn't. HD video in vlc on iOS is jerky and unpleasant.
A fast enough iOS device and 720 is playable in software. Even 1080i mpeg2 can be software decoded on my iPad 4, but mpeg2 isn't as CPU intensive.
There are iOS App Store approved players that playback HD video with hardware decoding. From what I gathered, they do this in a very clever way, they remux the file on the fly, so the h.264 video track is decoded by Apple's internal player/API/whatever. This works regardless of the file format, hence the remuxing.
Like I said, nPlayer and OPlayer are great players for those who can't jailbreak and need a robust player. I own both, even though all my iOS devices are jailbroken.
For XBMC to do something like what they do, the devs would have to rewrite how XBMC plays video, and that would be a massive task. It might not even be possible without doing even more from scratch (from what I can tell. I'm not a dev myself).