[McGeagh]

Congratulations! I have been tracking the progress of this project on and off and have been very impressed with what you have done in so little time…BY YOUR SELF! I honestly think the port of XBMC to ARM is going to offer a very bright future because of the fact that ARM is so low power, so small in size, and so dirt cheap (comparatively speaking that is). I take it; it is your end goal to have a fully functional ARM port of XBMC when you are done, correct?

Either way, I am not particularly familiar with the whole ARM scene but from my basic understanding the beagle board isn’t exactly the fastest ARM platform you can get…is that not so? Also, a few basic questions if you don’t mind answering them…

1. Once the port to ARM is finished won’t the software will be able to run on any ARM based platform with support for OpenGL ES 2.0 just as XBMC can currently runs on any X86 platform with OpenGL support?
2. Are the rest of the inner workings of XBMC fully functional in the state that your port is in now? AKA media library, network connectivity, audio playback, etc? (Basically everything besides the full speed video playback)?

Anyways, thanks for the update and please keep us informed…
Slice

P.S. I know there are ARM solutions from TI and others that offer hardware video/audio decoding capabilities, I was wondering if another potential avenue of exploration would be to strip-out XBMC’s software decoding code and perhaps implement a more platform specific decoding engine to take advantage of these types of hardware devices?

Thanks for your interest!

My goal is to get this port identical in functionality as the current linux version has. I know this is not immediately possible, so expect this to be a long-haul.

I chose the beagleboard because its cheap and easily obtainable. It has a vast community with lots of help available, and its v7a architecture. (Chose this due to it having NEON.) I also only chose the beagleboard as a first step development board. I know it cannot do everything I wanted, but such board isnt available yet.

Yes, this port will run on any board which is ARM based and has OpenGL ES 2.0.

The rest of the functionality currently is widely untested. Here is a list of things that currently do not work:

• Font colours (only white atm)
  
• Screensavers - even dim fucks up (random text rather than solid quad renders)
  
• Visualisations
  
• mulitpass rendering not implemented yet (i think - i forget)
  
• Audio player works if select DVDplayer and not PAplayer as the engine
  
• At small resolutions (480p and less) the text looks nosiy/messy
  
• Textures that get padded to 2048 do not render correctly, but instead clampstoedge
  
• Does not exit!
  
• avahi/zeroconf/atomics not implemented
  
• window test pattern not implemented yet
  
• dont think it works when not in fullscreen mode
  

There may be more, but they are currently untested
Sounds like a lot, but it was considerably more not long ago

Yes, I can use other pieces of hardware to accelerate performance, but thats a dangerous path to go down. unless done carefully, it can vastly restrict which platforms this will be able to run on. Saying that, once its fully working as is, I will be looking into this.

Thanks.