[geggog]

Xios DS is most defiantly not essentially an A10 in the same way as it's not a tegra2. Please stop thinking that just because something is armv7/Mali that it is the same device. While a similar armv7 core and Mali GPU are present, just about everything else is different. You really have to understand how modern SoC are designed and made. Generally you take a CPU soft-core, marry in GPU and anything else you want, pay some IC foundation to turn the crank and out pops your chip. If you did your homework right, then the chip actually works too Amlogic has their own SoC design, others too.

With Xios DS, we can use an amlogic based library that exists on android to skip OpenMax and go direct to hw decode/renderer. But because of how the lib works and API constraints, we had to do an internal player that works using the same API that our internal dvdplayer uses. While not 'perfect', it gets the job done.

With 'generic' android, we must use OpenMax which is hiding in android's private API. To use this we actually have to create an OpenMax-IL layer that talks to this private API. We could use something called OpenMax-AL but that only handles h264 in a transport stream... period. That means no mkv's, no nothing but h264 in a transport stream. Pretty limited. Same thing with Android's Media Player Class, h264 in a transport stream. boring as we don't want to rely on some big box doing transcoding like others, we want a real media center, right ?

But as jmarshall has said, once you do a full blown player, it's much simpler to take the concepts and apply them to other situations. A lot of time was spend re-discovering and documenting IPlayer API quirks, time that is not not required to create a different internal player that might be aimed at other hw.

Well there you go - thanks for the insight.