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Allwinner A10 : Is XBMC ported to MALI-400MP ?
For a chunk of change, you can design your own ARM SoC, and have it stamped out ad nausium by any of the block fabs, you can even do it without a block fab by using FPGA...

The construct is block based, with the CPU tied to other "married" devices on the SoC by the AMBA or Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture.
AMBA has 3 distinct parts, or interface classes...
1). Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI)
2). Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB)
3). Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)

Through these "buses" the CPU can directly address the secondary devices, or be addressed as a slave device, without much effort...

On some of the NXP devices I have worked on there is an AHB device called "DOLFIN" that does Mpeg 4, and Mpeg 2 decoding, through a simulated TSIN interface.
To send data to the DFN (Dolfin driver class) you set a pointer to a memory address that was 32 PS or TS packets in size (depending the source it was 188 or 127 bytes per packet)
Then you cleared the RDY flag, and passed the pointer address to APB.
I'm getting past my point...


Each SoC designer sets a different bus address for the AMBA bus partners, and even some of the passable registers are ordered differently, to accomplish much of the same tasks...

Examples of some devices that can be placed on the AMBA buses are as follows...

SATA controller
Ethernet controller
SDIO/MMC controller
Radio interface (Cellphone)
Serial port or UART
Thermal sensors
I2C controller
Watchdog controller
GPU
VPU
Media Controller
Sound Architecture devices (Recording and playback)
Tuners or Tuner interfaces (For Set top boxes)
Power Management controllers
Extensible memory interfaces
MTD devices (NAND / NOR flash devices)
The list goes on...

Needless to say, without the specifications for the EXACT device you are designing for, it is near impossible to know WHERE or WHAT device is there without the underlying operating system having intimate knowledge of them.
In the case of Allwinner, there is no accelerated display driver (I say it this way to simplify) and there is not a working Video decoder library for the VPU (the part responsible for decoding Video streams).
There is alot of work behind the scenes to get these things working on par with what is necessary to allow XBMC to work, Tom Cubie is smashing his head against a wall trying to get us what we need, and it will benefit more than just the XBMC community, it will benefit everyone who intends to put their software on the Allwinner A1X devices.
I hope this post was informative, and helped clear up any misconceptions...
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I think the very active discussion of the Android achievement by the XBMC team and the awesome support by Pivos shows how important this is for ARM and the A10. I know it is not a panacea for ARM Hardware decoding and I am not trying to equate the different SoCs, but it is just such a positive development for XBMC on ARM and hardware Decode.

For the A10, I am not sure how far it has moved the bar, the missing information for accessing the CedarX is very difficult to overcome. Perhaps this achievement will spur them (SoftWinner) to see the success to be had from Pivos and work with the community in a productive way. I am sure folks are working hard on the A10 HW Acceleration -- I don't see how XBMC for Android could detract from that. I don't see how a positive outcome for Pivos because of their stance toward supporting XBMC should make me feel anything but positively towards them.

Because XBMC can be made to serve multiple different frontends very nicely, I am highly likely to buy a XIOS DS (or XS) to play around with. When(if) my A100 (A1000) works with XBMC Hardware Decode, I will have one more thing to be happy about. I already have a Pi -- the fact it doesn't do exactly everything I want (MPEG2) hasn't meant that there I haven't learned and experienced a lot by making them work for other things.

And if my A10 based hardware never achieves hardware Decode, it doesn't mean that the struggle wasn't of value to many folks in moving the bar forwards -- I hope they are finding enjoyment in their process and it rewards them in every way. So, count me among the cheering section, not the griping section -- other than some small envy I have that the devs have the skills that I lack..
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As far as I can see the "amlplayer" was not released together with the android source code or did I miss something? Are there any licensing issues or what is the main reason for this?

This means that even if I would buy a Pivos Xios I would not be able to compile a HW accelerated version of XBMC on my own (e.g. the PVR version)...
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Gimli / XBMC Team,

I have come to make a humble apology for my comments the other day. I agree my comments were wrong and unfounded and that i jumped to unnecessary conclusions when trying to join the dots together. I was having a particularly bad day when i wrote the comments and vented some of my personal frustration on you and the forum so for that i am very sorry and sincerely apologies.

i'm not proud of my comments, and i really don't want other people out there to suffer as a result of my actions, so I hope this apology will go some ways to making things right for all the other A10 users out there.

Ribuck.

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nowkiss.jpg

EDIT: sorry, this was not meant to be an 'ass kiss image', it was just a pretty lame reference to reddit humour...
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Hansarch, sorry but you ass kiss image failed.

Hey I made a mistake, but at least I had the decency to admit when I was wrong, so feel free to try and post more ass kissing images as it doesn't bother me either way.
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Thanks Ribuck Smile
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.


Image
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(2012-07-16, 19:59)mikrohard Wrote: As far as I can see the "amlplayer" was not released together with the android source code or did I miss something? Are there any licensing issues or what is the main reason for this?

This means that even if I would buy a Pivos Xios I would not be able to compile a HW accelerated version of XBMC on my own (e.g. the PVR version)...

It should be in by end of week. It's being cleaned up and there's a few things that need pull injected first.
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That's great news... thanks for the info.
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Bam! And I'm back on the XBMC bandwagon after a two year hiatus since I retired my original Xbox.

2 x Xios DS units on the way - I'm more than happy to support hardware manufacturers who support open source software.
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(2012-07-17, 10:38)geggog Wrote: Bam! And I'm back on the XBMC bandwagon after a two year hiatus since I retired my original Xbox.

2 x Xios DS units on the way - I'm more than happy to support hardware manufacturers who support open source software.

I'm going to have to wait a month before I order one. It wasn't even on my list a week ago though.

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Lets move the Xios DS discussion elsewhere please, this thread topic is A10.
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Hackberry Tongue
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/07/17/h...th-1gb-ram
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Any plans to support Airplay on XBMC for android? I see you guys removed the networking section of the Systems Menu.. Also it only lets you choose one background now instead of separate ones for each section like on the ATV2 Sad
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Davilla,

With the xbmc port to android, is it going to be aimed at 2.3 or 4.x, The only reason I ask is because I think I read somewhere that some a10 based tablets possibly already have some form of gpu acceleration already enabled under 2.3, but not sure if that also included the vdu.

I think it was possibly ainol and Onda tablets, and wondered if any of their drivers might be helpful.


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