Slashdot Mirror
New XBMC Port Promises ARM-Powered HD In the Palm of Your Hand
Engadget has a recent teaser video promising HD content via XBMC running on a 600MHz Beagleboard. This could mean great things for home theater putterers, with the Beagleboard tipping the scales at a modest $150 and the ability to fit in the palm of your hand. Already running on everything from MIDs to AppleTVs and now moving to ARM-powered devices like the Beagleboard, it looks like XBMC needs to be renamed from "Xbox Media Center" to "ubiquitous media center."
This looks incredible if they can pull it off, but until this is out, what is the cheapest XBMC machine I could throw together that would be able to play any content I throw at it?
I'd love to jump on upgrading from my vintage Xbox XBMC, but I'd hate to drop a few hundred on an upgrade only to find out that it plays 99% of videos out there, but chokes on all high bit rate 1080p MKVs with lots of action, or something like that.
The Beagleboard runs at 500Mhz, not 600Mhz (they underclock the processor for reliability. I have one btw)
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
I seem to remember a year or two ago there was a call for maintainers of the Xbox port - seeing that they want to get away from it (old/obsolete hardware that few people have left, requires use of Xbox SDK that no one has access to now (legally)).
Of course, the ability to run elsewhere (Windows/Mac/Linux/etc) has given it a lot more legitimacy in the world, so I think the Xbox side has been downplayed to be almost non-existent now.
I just threw an NVIDIA 8400 GS 512MB PCI card into my ancient PIII 600mHz, and since I'm running Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 although I've seriously tweaked the install) XBMC just uses VDPAU to offload all the rendering to the video card. And yes, it can do 1080p x264 video just fine, which amuses me to no end since the majority of the parts in that computer are from 1999!
If you don't have a spare old computer around, or you want to buy a complete solution, basically any of the "Ion-based" nettops should be cheap, tiny and get the job done. There's tons out there, and you can even get one from System76 that already has Ubuntu installed ( http://system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=95 ) at which point you only need to add the XBMC PPA to the repository list, click install and apply, and voila, a tiny cheap machine capable of 1080p video. For some anecdotal evidence on how easily these setups can run you can hunt around the XBMC forums a bit. Basically the key is just to get any kind of machine with a GeForce 8-or-later card in it, and the newer ones have even more features as far as using VDPAU is concerned.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Although it's easy to still think of it as the X-Box Media Center still, it's been renamed to XBMC Media Center for quite awhile owing to the vast amount of systems it runs on. Lovely fact checking there /. :P
But when will it run on an xbox 360?
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
Is that an HD Beagleboard in your pocket, or you just happy to see me in 1080p?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The smart thing to do would be to offload the streaming to a suitable DSP chip. I have no idea to what extent the BeagleBoard supports this (probably does).
Don't you ever get bored?
/me follows up self.
See other people's posts above. The BB has a TI decoder chip on it as standard.
Because I've seen some TI driver source code and it's frankly, shit. No wonder they left the camera module off
As I recall, the pandora handheld is also built on an OMAP3530 and has a video out jack. Video playback didn't work out so well for Sony's PSP, but having a HTPC in my pocket that can stream my videos over the network seems like a good thing.
1. XBMC on ARM Branch can be viewed here: http://xbmc.org/trac/browser/branches/xbmc_on_arm
2. Discussion about XBMC on ARM with a lot more background info is going on here in the official forum: http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35139&page=14
3. You might want to link to the first source i.e. the official xbmc webpage: http://xbmc.org/theuni/2009/10/23/xbmc-on-arm-gles-2-0/
4. XBMC is not called Xbox Media Center anymore, just XBMC.
Reminds me of the arm-powered watches that you wear on your wrist. They wind themselves by the swinging motion as you walk.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Or other network media tank? I love my IO-100 and it plays everything I have ever thrown at it. Low wattage, runs linux, excellent audio/video connectivity and is I think 300mhz mips.
I am building a system from them to do XBMC on my TV
The Board I am buying is this one here Zotac ION
Slap it in a vesa mounted cheap case with a laptop hard drive and I'm done.
My whole media system will be under $300, vesa mounted to the back of my TV and controlled with my existing ATI/X10 Media remote.
All my cds/dvds have been backed up to my file server which has mountable network shares for XBMC to use.
Long live XBMC!
So?
You can signup on their website to get the specs. You can't release the information to others, but then, GPL doesn't allow them to distribute GPL'd code the way they'd like to.
OSS can certain use the acceleration, it just requires binary distribution to fit their agenda. Just like GPL requires source distribution also to support its agenda.
They are two different sides of the same thing, restrictions on freedom.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You could look at www.embeddedarm.com.
They have x86 and ARM single board computers. The TS-3000 line uses 386 processors. They have serial ports and many IO lines.
They don't mention it in the advertising, but I see some headers marked "JTAG" on the 386 boards. That's a little bit out of my area of expertise, but maybe that's what you're looking for?
I considered getting one of the ARM board to make a very small web server, but the prices seemed a little bit high, and I decided to go with an old, cheap, used desktop PC instead.
It might be worth a look anyway, hope that helps.
I've always played with MythTV...how would people that have used both compare them? Pros vs Cons of each system?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
WD LIVE blows this away, and has better playback....
A much better bang for the buck.
http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=735
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
There's a way to watch/play mythtv recordings/live tv on xbmc using the myth:// protocol. I find that xbmc works a lot better than myth for existing media and don't bother running the mythtv frontend.
I would recommend that you check out an ARM board that has good support in OpenOCD. This creates an excellent development platform for the stuff you mentioned.
Check out the Olimex L9260 board. It is based on an ARM926 core and has plenty of RAM and Flash. It also has SD/MMC interface, SPI, I2C, UART etc
http://www.olimex.com/dev/sam9-L9260.html
OpenOCD software:
http://openocd.berlios.de/web/
You need a hardware device for OpenOCD to work. There are plenty of options, most are based on the FTDI 2232 chip. Here is one from Olimex:
http://www.olimex.com/dev/arm-usb-ocd.html
It is possible to use openocd from linux, mac os x and windows.
You're right, a 600MHz ARM can not decode 1080p HD video, a 2-odd GHz Core 2 Duo (with no other hardware acceleration) struggles to do that.
The Beagleboard also has a ::href="http://www.bdti.com/procsum/tic64xx.htm">TMS320C64x DSP that can decode HD video.
TI also make a DaVinci SoC that can do realtime HD transcoding - decoding and reencoding.
Over on YouTube is a beagleboard doing 720p HD video already...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
XBMC is a media player only. If you want to record TV, you still need Myth. If you don't, XBMC is roughly 325 million times easier to set up and use.
The BeagleBoard draws a maximum of 375mA when powered from 5V. This is the whole system running at full tilt, with an SD card etc. That equates to a power draw of 1.875W (0.375 x 5) and realistically you're going to be looking at a much lower power draw than this in regular usage.
I have a BeagleBoard with Ubuntu installed and did an apt-get ubuntu-netbook-remix on it. It took a few hours of pretty much 100% CPU utilisation and the chip was barely warm to the touch...
Power figures are quoted from the latest Hardware Reference Manual - warning PDF link...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
So, it is basically a glorified DVD player?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The market is wide open right now for products like this. Imagine if someone could sell a little black box that runs XBMC and supports full HD for $100. It doesn't seem that far off. It doesn't need to have storage or memory or any sort of drive. The main connectivity option would be ethernet, for connecting over the LAN to a PC which holds all the content. A USB port would also be nice to support an external hard drive, a flash drive stick, and/or a wireless adapter.
(I know there are already similar products. I currently run XBMC on an Xbox, and I have a PS3. However, the Xbox doesn't handle HD video, and the PS3 has a poor interface and lacks support for some formats. I'm waiting for that simple, cheap, does-it-all option to finally arrive.)
I'd also love to see something similar just for audio. Imagine a little box with just an ethernet connection and an audio output. It would connect to a media server which would stream music to it, and then output that music to some powered speakers or to any sort of device. The music could be controlled by any device on the local network with web access to the media server. It could be a nearby computer, or a phone with a web browser and wifi.
This would give you something like the Sonos multi-room system. But instead of spending over $1000, you could spend under $100. If a person already has a server and a LAN set up, they can use that rather than buying expensive new equipment.
How expensive could it be to make a little box which connects to a LAN and outputs audio? Twenty bucks? You could buy just one to have audio for your kitchen, or buy several and set up your entire home.
Except that it plays basically any media format off of almost anything you can somehow attach to a computer while organizing it all in to libraries, pulling box art, etc.
Xvid, WMV, MPEG1/2/4, Quicktime, even freakin' Real. VCDs, DVDs, great!
Local HD, USB, SMB, NFS, UPnP, iTunes....
I hope you get the picture. And that's just what I used to use it for with my Xbox years ago. I've been more organized since leaving college and switched to a Windows MCE setup once I didn't need to support millions of sources as WMCE had hardware decoding where XBMC didn't, so for HD it was my only choice. That has since changed though, so XBMC is coming back soon I'm sure.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
A glorified DVD, photo, video, music player with networking, streaming, playlist abilities, profiles, and meta-data management, yes.
Xvid, WMV, MPEG1/2/4, Quicktime, even freakin' Real. VCDs, DVDs, great!
Local HD, USB, SMB, NFS, UPnP, iTunes....
Here's what the revelation was for me:
Sometimes I'd get video files packed into RAR archives. I'd grumble about having to unpack them before playing them in XBMC.
Then by accident, browsed into a RAR from within XBMC. This thing will stream video files from inside RARs on the fly!
And it plays formats I can't get my Windows box or Mac to recognise.