poofyhairguy Wrote:But see, that is where you are wrong. Its not that there is some pre-key/post-key mentality. It is that, quite honestly, in 2011 a PS3 isn't that great of HTPC hardware. Back in 2006, it was amazing. In 2011? Not so much.
This is where you are 100% wrong. The PS3 on its best day is a worse media center than any ION system. Why?
I guess the general reaction to your entire post would be - maybe you don't care about a PS3 XBMC port, but others do. Others would like to see XBMC on PS3, and just because you don't is, well, frankly, irrelevant.
For instance, I honestly don't care about any ION system, to be frank with you. Have no interest in ever buying one.
A PS3 port of XBMC has awesome written all over it - everybody is talking about it, everybody wants it, and judging by the amount of requests you're getting, looks like the only ones that don't feel the same way are the devs.
It would be a return to its roots - and that is console-land with a leaked SDK. That's how XBMC (and XBMP, its predecessor) began, that is what the GUI is built around (fact) and nobody can pussyfoot around that and act as if it wasn't. I'm sorry if you guys weren't around when this project was called XBOX Media Player, but I was. This project began as a media player FOR a console - not a HTPC box.
PlayStation3 is fast becoming the Xbox 1 of its day - and to have this kind of apathetic response from a development group that should know better is quite frankly just inexcusable. Everybody could add 2 + 2 together here and realize the amount of potential there is in having a Lv2 GameOS XBMC port - IF IMPLEMENTED WELL.
I don't care about running the latest super-duper skin - if a PS3 XBMC port could manage full-speed H264/x264, then most users would be satisfied. That it would be inferior to an ION would be quite frankly irrelevant - what counts is that it does what most people want out of it.
I don't wish to be antagonistic here - but it's quite dispiriting to have to sift through page and page here of litanous posts where people are getting scorned for even daring to ask about a PS3 port. It just sounds like people are making up excuses for not wanting to do a port in the first place, and instead are insistent on telling others how much the PS3 sucks and that they would not want a port anyway. That is not a constructive response.
Back on-point:
Me and Themaister have been working on a Mplayer port - it already works on PS3, but the current problem is that H264 is damn slow. We're already using a shader for the YUV-to-RGB conversion, so that takes some of the load off the PPU. We don't use the SPEs due to lack of experience on that front, although to get anywhere we would obviously have to.
Github is here:
https://github.com/Themaister/SLIMPlayer
We researched some of the OtherOS development back in the day - it seems like none of them eventually delivered on an SPE-accelerated H264 decoder - although there are a bunch of academic dissertations on the topic.
We will need some more experienced devs to help us out if we're going to make some progress on this.
Quote:1. A PS3's Cell CPU for general purpose tasks (like the power needed for skins like Aeon) is about as slow as a Pentium 3 800 MHZ CPU. Yeah, really.
This is a bit of a flawed analogy. You're talking about the PPU that is the equivalent of a Pentium 3 800MHz CPU (and even that is a massive exaggeration - Pentium 4 is more the kind of ballpark we're talking about). You simply can't expect an in-order PPC to be fed code full of branches and other stuff that out-of-order branch-predictive Intel CPUs have no problem with and then declare it to be the equivalent of a 'Pentium 3 800Mhz CPU'. You have to optimize for the specific architecture - and in this case, since the architecture is fixed, at least you know what to aim for. There's only one fixed hardware set to optimize for - a blessing in disguise in some cases.
You are aware how insanely fast the SPEs are, right? And you have 6 of them - there's lots of potential there - the only problem is how to use them efficiently for programs of this type.
Quote:2. A PS3 has only 256mb of RAM, meaning that all decent skins will CRAWL on there. I know this because my AppleTV has the same restriction and its hardware is "fully utilized." An ION system with 2GB of RAM is magnitudes better.
You have 256MB of additional RAM on the RSX that you can use and allocate as well. Read up on the SDK docs.
Quote:3. A PS3 has a rotational HD, in the age of SSDs. An ION system with a SSD will have MAGNITUDES better performance in that area.
PS3, unlike the Xbox 360, allows you to easily replace HDs. You can put an SSD in if you care about that kind of stuff - Digital Foundry did just that and saw GT5 loading times becoming vastly better as a result of it.
To whoever did the OpenGL ES driver - that looks promising - might be a good stepping stone towards getting XBMC eventually on the PS3.