Following this morning announcement, I’ve started to build XBMC for Android using the instructions on XBMC Android github repository, but it takes hours on my machine. In the meantime, I’ve found a prebuilt apk that I’ve tried on my Mele A1000 and shot a (super blurry) video.
This is still a development version, so there are a lot of bugs, but it shows good progress. The user interface renders at 28 fps and it’s very smooth, although CPU usage is about 65%. The remote control can work properly, but XBMC does not respond to mouse clicks and keyboard input. It can find UPNP servers (Windows) and locate your file. SMB client crashes XBMC on my system
I’ve tried Big Buck Bunny 480p, 720p and 1080p, and none of the sample can play smoothly, so NEON software decoding does not appear to be fast enough to play videos smoothly. The APK is a debug build, and I’m not sure how this could affect video decoding performance.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Thank you for the report, wanted to try it myself but now I’ll wait for functional playback.
Yeah it runs nice and is fine for pictures and music but no hardware decoding for video yet. Also it doesn’t go full screen either. It’s a shame the d-pad on the Mele remote is so bad, thats one weak area as you make use of the d-pad a lot in XBMC. The higher end remote Mele sell has a much better d-pad (basically a clone of Boxee remote only better) but I havent tested it yet to see if it works (I do have one & will try later). But extremely cool stuff none the less and I tip… Read more »
@ Dan
BTW, Boxee Remote works great on my Mini X running XBMC for Android 🙂
xbmc have really pulled off a really good stunt, getting it out without any leaks. I tried the build from miniand on my mele a2000. There are keyboard issues using xbmc, I was unable to use the keyboard on the mele f10. Also unable to use the virtual keyboard using the dpad. The only way I could found to work it, was using vnc server software (droid VNC Server) on the a2000.
I checked out the 1channel addon for playback and that was choppy too.
@ NPS How do you use the Boxee remote ? do you mean the PC one they used to sell if so that’s very handy. I tried the Mele F10 remote and it worked fine in XBMC, the only problem is that when you disable the air mouse feature, the button in the centre of the d-pad activates it again (argh!) and throws you off, your natural inclination is to press the button in the middle of the pad to select/enter but Mele have mapped it to left mouse button. To avoid waking the mouse you have to press the… Read more »
I hope this helps the move to Linux. Personally I would not want XBMC on Android.
@ e8hffff
That is still being worked by some other people so yeah hopefully that will be another option, it might unleash the full performance of the hardware with no OS limitations.
For the Mele you should buy the F10 remote. Works absolutly GREAT. I’m really excited about the news that XBMC will be coming to android because my A2000 really lacks good media-center software.
If you want to see what software decoding can do, try the armeavi-v7l package from here: http://code.google.com/p/jjmpeg/downloads/list This is using the latest (ish) ffmpeg, compiled with (most) NEON optimisations and with a lightweight multi-threaded player. Its pretty buggy and might not work – but if it does, it should show what current software decoding can do on your machine. On a gigahertz single-core cpu, mpeg4 @ 480p might be doable (depending on the bit-rate), but 720p wont be. webm is slower again. Other formats might work better (e.g. mpeg2) XBMC had troubles on the beagleboard as it has a lot… Read more »
@ e8hffff
You can follow http://www.j1nx.nl blog, Peter is closely following gimli (XBMC developer) work to port XBMC to A10 devices in Linux with hardware acceleration.
@ notzed
If I remember correctly, I’ve seen XMBC play 720p video on the snowball board using NEON software decoding pretty smoothly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14p-WOFAWWw&feature=player_embedded), but the processor is a bit faster and dual core (although I’m not sure ffmeg can make use of dual core), and it was running in Linux (Ubuntu).
I tried the same apk on the ics on meleA2000, but I tried with vga and composite out as I havn’t a hdmi to test on. I only get the xbmc-logo and then program run but the screen is black.
@ Hste
I also used VGA in the video above. Since it’s a development version it will often crash for various reasons, which must be why XBMC devs haven’t released a beta apk yet.