[BLKMGK]

I think it is the other way round. Patch ffmpeg inside xbmc and adapt the xbmc code (DVDPlayer) to make it work with the patches without breaking the software decoding.

Now I wasn't expecting it to work already, but if it would already compile, we can check what error messages we get.

I'm thinking it's not going to be quite that easy, especially since I am NOT familiar with XBMC's codebase and haven't done any sort of development in years - none of that development was nearly as complex as XBMC nor in a language even remotely resembling XBMC. So no, I cannot easily try this.

That said, I think some of the bitches about the ffmpeg patches appear to be that it doesn't fail over the way they might like when the code isn't able to do the hardware based decoding. I don't know about you but I would NOT want to be in a situation where I could use hardware decoding or nothing at all so I think that this sort of behaviour is certainly not what we would want. Hopefully that has been solved but I am not sure from some of the comments I'm reading - it's hard to follow sometimes.

Now, I'm not sure who maintains the ffmpeg code in XBMC but whoever it is is probably watching the ffmpeg mailing list and is probably WELL aware of these patches. They are probably playing with them quietly waiting for them to mature or they have a philosophical issue with the closed source stuff and refuse - maybe they just haven't had time. So, it's interesting to follow what's going on and point it out for others to look at but really we're at the mercy of whoever has the talent to integrate this. Hopefully they have the hardware needed to test it and develop for it, if not I may be willing to step up and solve the problem if it's simply hardware. Davilla in particular sounded interested in this but I know he's REALLY busy with the OSX and aTV stuff too so he might not be able to split his attention from that valuable work...