2007-12-10, 11:53
No, XBMC for Linux will never be ported by Team-XBMC to run on Dreambox/DBox2.
Dreambox/DBox2 may be classified as "a computer running Linux" but it is not a x86 architecture computer, nor does it feature a OpenGL 2.0 (3D hardware acceleration graphic processor unit) which is the minimum requirements to make the XBMC GUI run smoothly. Also, like rodalpho stated, even if XBMC did not require x86 and OpenGL 2.0 (which it does), the 250Mhz CPU of a Dreambox/DBox2 is not even close to powerfull enough to run the graphic intense XBMC GUI, ...because believe it or not, the XBMC is a relativly graphic intense GUI; just try to run XBMC in 'SDL_2D' mode on a 3Ghz (3000Mhz) x86 CPU without a modern OpenGL 2.0 GPU, you might get 2 or 3 frames-per-seconds displayed at best, the reason for this is that the OpenGL 2.0 GPU is used to draw and scale the pictures from the XBMC GUI on the screen and that is very graphic intense and thus requires a modern hardware GPU (graphic processor unit) which can accelerate this process to off-load the CPU (central processor unit) which is not design and optomized for that task, which a GPU is.
To sum up; the XBMC Linux port project clearly states that the goal was and still is to first port XBMC to run on x86 CPU and OpenGL 2.0 GPU. ...now even if that would to change sometime in the future it would surely still be to a more powerfull platform than the original Xbox (which features a 733Mhz x86 CPU and we will for sure also require a modern hardware GPU (graphic processor unit) for video display acceleration.
Dreambox/DBox2 may be classified as "a computer running Linux" but it is not a x86 architecture computer, nor does it feature a OpenGL 2.0 (3D hardware acceleration graphic processor unit) which is the minimum requirements to make the XBMC GUI run smoothly. Also, like rodalpho stated, even if XBMC did not require x86 and OpenGL 2.0 (which it does), the 250Mhz CPU of a Dreambox/DBox2 is not even close to powerfull enough to run the graphic intense XBMC GUI, ...because believe it or not, the XBMC is a relativly graphic intense GUI; just try to run XBMC in 'SDL_2D' mode on a 3Ghz (3000Mhz) x86 CPU without a modern OpenGL 2.0 GPU, you might get 2 or 3 frames-per-seconds displayed at best, the reason for this is that the OpenGL 2.0 GPU is used to draw and scale the pictures from the XBMC GUI on the screen and that is very graphic intense and thus requires a modern hardware GPU (graphic processor unit) which can accelerate this process to off-load the CPU (central processor unit) which is not design and optomized for that task, which a GPU is.
To sum up; the XBMC Linux port project clearly states that the goal was and still is to first port XBMC to run on x86 CPU and OpenGL 2.0 GPU. ...now even if that would to change sometime in the future it would surely still be to a more powerfull platform than the original Xbox (which features a 733Mhz x86 CPU and we will for sure also require a modern hardware GPU (graphic processor unit) for video display acceleration.
