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You need licences for some video codecs like MPEG
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Ok thanks, I never thought about the codec side of things, but this still leaves me confused. For example the mele boxes are using the all winner chip and they support most codecs, so wouldn't all inner have already sorted he codec licenses or is it down to mele to pay the fee's for their device using the codecs ?
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(2012-06-05, 10:36)Ribuck Wrote: Please excuse my lack of knowledge, but what are the licenses that all winner had to sort out used for ? I thought open source was license free and that both the lima and Mali developers drivers wouldn't require any legal framework.
A LOT of the released files had the following line on top!
"All right reserved"
Basically it means, whatever you gonna do, you need permission for it!
Then there were A TON of files which contained no license statement what so ever. It doesn't work like that; If the license is unsure, it does not automatically make it free of use.
If you want to distribute an OpenELEC version for example, which includes a linux kernel + Allwinner drivers and such. It has to be stated that you are allowed to redistribute it.
Now it is!
The video codec is different as the library is closed source, therefor only binary blobs are present.
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Thanks J1nx, it makes sense now.
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touser
Senior Member
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This is very exciting! I'm curious though, for anyone with experience running XBMC on this type of hardware, how well does it handle a large video library with tons of fan art? Will this ever be as fast as an x86 machine for browsing through the library? I've seen video's of atv2's navigating through menu's and they don't seem to handle it so well.
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davilla
Retired-Team-XBMC Developer
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No matter how you slice it, If you have a heavy height skin and want instant performance, then these arm boxes are not what you are looking for... Move along.
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2012-06-07, 08:19
(This post was last modified: 2012-06-07, 08:21 by Ribuck.)
Touser the main advantage of these devices arm based devices is the power saving. Running at full pelt you're looking at around 3-5 watts vs nearer 40- 50 watts for the most power efficient pc. So do you want menu speed savings or electricity/money savings ?
Touser Note traditional pc, depending on your graphics card can consume anywhere between 150-600+ watts
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My 2008 Mac Mini consumes 29W when playing a 720p video. It's nearer 20W at idle.
My Revo 3610 consumes 23W when playing a 720p video.
In the UK one watt costs about £1.25 a year if it's running 24x7, so the financial consequences of the ARM's low power consumption are insignificant.
What's more exciting is that the ARMs are so small and cheap that I can see them appearing in all sorts of kit e.g. your DVD player could run XBMC.
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There just isn't the processing power in these ARM processors to ever make the skins as smooth, fluid and lag free like they will be on even a basic x86 processor. Especially with all the eye candy in most of the skins. I just saw that Ronie, a Team-XBMC Member has started updating the broken Simplicity skin to work with Eden. I'm guessing a skin like, without all the eye candy, will be a bit smoother than the stock Confluence skin. Especially if using the list layout for movies and turning off the fan art backgrounds. I'm sure somebody will make an ARM optimized basic skin once all the kinks are worked out with the various devices like this and the Raspberry Pi.
Ultimately, as long as my low cost ARM device can play the movies fine, I could care less how smooth the interface is as long as I can navigate to and start my movies.
HTPC 1 - AMD A8-3870K, ASRock A75M, Silverstone ML03B, Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3 1866, Crucial M4 64GB SSD
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2012-06-08, 07:48
(This post was last modified: 2012-06-08, 09:41 by Ribuck.)
RockerC, be patient my friend. Like j1nx said it's not just about motivation, there is a legal aspect. Even though the gpu drivers are now released, developers have had to get express written permission to use them which has to be documented properly to cover their backs, which has taken some time.
This has just recently been completed, so developers are now working on A10 ports, in the next few weeks I expect we'll see some good progress.
Trust me I'm as anxious as you are to get xbmc running on my A10 devices, but would rather have something that is done properly than rushed and be unstable.