[thefrog]

I am starting to get slightly dubious about the whole A10 / Mele port, to the point that i have bought a Raspberry Pi.

I can understand, I actually already have a Raspberry Pi. It is a decent little board and I have run OpenELEC and Raspbmc on it. I've actually used it to do some useful work, and the coolest thing about it was everyone else in the house with iPhones started AirPlaying to it before I even knew that worked. I think if I could switch the DB to a MySQL server elsewhere on my network, a lot of the odd and ends slowness would disappear.

But right now, there is no MPEG2 Decoding in the VPU due to licensing. Most of my world is MPEG2, 7TB of DVDs and all my LiveTV. I don't know about the BD ISOs yet. I don't know when or if the Foundation will ever make this available -- there have been lots of discussions on the forums that diminish my expectation that it will ever be available.

The reason i'm starting to think this way is that i don't understand how other hardware platforms like the Cubox came along later and yet have seem to have managed tangible results and have shown working demo's of the actual hardware running xbmc to some extent, which is something we have not seen with any A10 platform.

I'm not sure about the CuBox timeline, I think it became available before the RPi. I think each of the offerings (OMAP, ATV, Tegra, lots more) are pushing the ARM coding envelope further and further. Some things translate into improvements for all XBMC releases under ARM.

I think the other than ATV's running xbmc with hardware acceleration, the only other platform i can think of is the Snowball board which uses the A9

It's just a shame that Allwinner themselves aren't actively getting involved in helping the Opensource community with drivers issues, as this would benefit so many people, and not just people wanting XBMC.

I can't say how involved Allwinner is or is not. I am not assuming that the dearth of communication is a lack of cooperation. The XBMC project has been pretty vocal in the past when something: "Will Never Work, stop Asking" and we aren't there yet.

The reason I am not hacking ATVs is because at their heart, Apple does not want me in their hardware .. and any effort I make to use their hardware in the ways I want they are going to actively work against. At some point Apple will have a version that we will have no use for.

So I got a RPi, and I've ordered a Mele A1000. I'll try to remain hopeful. They have a certain minimum utility function that I can use them for (like my Old WD TV Live Plus) while I wait for something better and any XBMC goodness is just awesome.