[The Garage]

Workaround Found! Not ideal, but at least it works!

1. Start XBMC without GL video accelleration. On my debian sid xfce4.8 box I edited /usr/share/applications/xbmc.desktop. Change the Exec line to:

Code:

Exec=sh -c "LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=y xbmc"

The GUI will be slow, but useable. Works best if you disable mouse support.

2. Set up XBMC to play all video in an External Player using playercorefactory.xml.
Install VLC.

Code:

apt-get install vlc

Create file playercorefactory.xml in ~/.xbmc/userdata . Paste the following into playercorefactory.xml.

Code:

<playercorefactory>
<players>
   <player name="VLC" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
     <filename>/usr/bin/vlc</filename>
     <args> --fullscreen --play-and-exit "{1}"</args>
     <hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
     <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
     <warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
   </player>
</players>
<rules action="append">
  <rule video="true" player="VLC">
</rule>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>

Tip: Make sure you do not have a file "advancedsettings.xml" in ~/.xbmc/userdata or the playercorefactory.xml file will be ignored!


3. If you are going to play sources streamed from online you should probably edit vlc settings to increase buffer time as standard settings are very short. Launch VLC. Go to Tools>Preferences click "all" in the bottom left corner then select Input/Codecs from the list on the left. Scroll down on the right to the "Advanced" section & select the line "network caching (ms). Change the value to something like 30000. [for 30 seconds of buffering, more if you'd like.] Click Save button on bottom right & close vlc.

What will happen:
1. XBMC will start, without crashing, but the gui is a bit slow. Select your video. When stream starts coming in xbmc will "hide". Give it a bit & VLC will open & begin playing your video fullscreen, WITH hardware accelleration! The amber color line in the bottom vlc controls bar shows buffering progress. When the video ends, or you close vlc, xbmc will reappear allowing you to continue.

Conclusion: It appears that the only thing crashing xbmc on these old intel cards is the xbmc gui, not GL accelleration when playing videos....as they work with both vlc & mplayer used as external players. I would still like to hope that xbmc could be fixed, but until then hopefully this workaround will help others.