FOSDEM 2015 Schedule – January 31 – February 1 2015

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) takes place every year during the first week-end of February. This year the developer-oriented event expects to bring over 5000 geeks to share ideas and collaborate on open source projects. Contrary to most other events, it’s free to attend, and you don’t even need to register, just show up. FOSDEM 2015 will take place on January 31- February 1 in Brussels. There will be 551 sessions divided into 5 keynotes, 40 lightning talks, 6 certification exams, and with the bulk being developer rooms and main tracks,  divided into 7 main tracks this year: Languages, Performance, Time, Typesetting, Hardware, Security and Miscellaneous. I’m not going to attend, but it’s still interested to see what will be talked about, and I’ve concocted my own little virtual program out of the main tracks and developers’ rooms. There’s a few minutes overlap between some talks […]

$46 EKB318 / F6 Android Media Player Features Rockchip RK3128, Supports H.265 Decoding

Rockchip RK3128 is a quad core Cortex A7 processor with a Mali GPU that supports H.265 video decoding up 1080p, and aimed at tablets, but it also found it way into mini PCs such as EKB318 (aka F6) with 1GB RAM, and 8GB flash in what looks like the answer from Rockchip to Amlogic S805 solutions. F6 / EKK318 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3128 quad core ARM Cortex A7 @ 1.3 GHz (or 1.2GHz) with ARM Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 1 GB DDR3 Storage – 8 GB NAND flash + micro SD slot (up to 32GB) Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and optional Bluetooth 4.0. Video Output – HDMI 1.4 Audio Output – HDMI, optical S/PDIF Video Codec Decode – H.265, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, AVS, VC-1, RV, VP6/VP8, Sorenson Spark, MVC up to 1920×1080 @ 60fps Encode – H.264, H.265, VP8, MVC (1080p) USB – […]

Kodi DVB and PVR Support on Android (Rockchip RK3288)

XBMC/Kodi for Android has come a long way, but it’s still missing some features of Kodi Linux, such as Live TV (DVB) and  video recording (PVR) function that so far could only be supported in Linux port of Kodi such as OpenELEC linux distributions, simply because PVR backends such as TVHeadend were not available for Android. So what’s TVheadend is exactly and what features does it bring? It’s an open source TV streaming PVR backend software application for Linux supporting DVB-S/S2, DVB-C, DVB-T/T2, ATSC, IPTV (UDP/HTTP), and Analog video (V4L) as input sources. Version 3.4 also adds support for time-shifting. Now the good news is that Freaktab user’s Taki has posted instructions to install TVHeadend server for RK3288. So if you have a compatible USB Tuner, you should be able to watch live TV on your Rockchip RK3288 based TV box. After the server is installed, you’d also need to  […]

MBX-3G is an Android Media Player with a Built-in 3G Modem (Crowdfunding)

Most full sized TV box comes with both Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, but if you live in remote area internet may not be easily available, except possibly via 3G or LTE. There are several ways to handle that. You could connect a 3G USB dongle to your box, but this assume the firmware on your box supports it, or you could gt one cheap of these cheap routers with a USB port, plug the 3G dongle into it, and connect your media player to the router via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. If you’d rather have a single device with an easier setup, MediaBox MBX-3G could be an interesting option. MediaBox MBX-3G specifications: SoC – Quad core ARM Cortex A9 @ 1.6Ghz with quad core GPU (This looks like Rockchip RK3188) System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 8 eMMC flash + microSD slot (up to 32GB) Video & Audio Output – […]

Top 10 Posts of 2014 and Stats on CNX Software

Wow! After a slow start of the year, 2014 has been a busy year as new devices based on newer processor from Amlogic started to flood the market in Q2, soon followed by even more Rockchip RK3288 based media players, and then some more Amlogic S805 and Allwinner A80 boards and devices. It’s now the last day of the year, so just like in 2013, it’s time to look back on the main trends of the year, and based on the list of the top 10 most visited posts below, the new generation of ARM Android media players were the most important story of the year on CNX Software, but we also saw more IoT devices and board like Vidonn X5 or LinkIT One, lots of new Wi-Fi modules, and by the end of the year ESP8266 seemed to have won that fight, but being found in $3 Wi-Fi modules. […]

WebGL Demos in Radxa Rock Pro Board Running Firefox OS 2.1

Radxa Rock Pro is a development board powered by Rockchip RK3188 quad core Cortex A9 processor, and although 2D/3D graphics acceleration via Mali-400MP4 is shown to be possible in Linux with tools like es2gears and glmark2-es2, full integration is seldom worked on, and things like WebGL may not work in web browsers. But thanks to the work of naobsd and MatchStick team, Firefox OS has been ported to this Rockchip development board, and as you’ll see in the video below, some WebGL demos work amazingly well. The hardware setup for this demo is comprised of Radxa Rock Pro development board, a 7″ LCD display with touchscreen, and some lego bricks :). WebGL demos can be found @ https://developer.mozilla.org/ja/demos/tag/tech:webgl, so you could try your own platform to see how it performs. If you own a Radxa Board Pro (or Lite), you can even build Firefox OS by yourself by following the […]

Linux 3.18 Released

Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 3.18 last Sunday: It’s been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out. I’d love to say that we’ve figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven’t. At the same time, there’s absolutely no point in having everybody else twiddling their thumbs when a couple of people are actively trying to bisect an older issue, so holding up the release just didn’t make sense. Especially since that would just have then held things up entirely over the holiday break. So the merge window for 3.19 is open, and DaveJ will hopefully get his bisection done (or at least narrow things down sufficiently that we have that “Ahaa” moment) over the next week. But in solidarity with Dave (and to make my life easier too 😉 let’s try to avoid introducing any _new_ […]

Android 5.0 Lollipop Now Boots on Rockchip RK3188 Tablets

Android 5.0 source code was pushed to AOSP less than a week ago, but oma7144, a member of Arctablet CrewRKTablets, already managed to have a preliminary firmware boot on Odys Iron, a tablet powered by Rockchip RK3188. This is still work in progress, and the firmware image has not been made available for download, but it looks promising, and that means Android Lollipop firmware images for Rockchip tablets and mini PCs could be released sooner than I initially expected. Some screenshots taken from the tablet. You can find more screenshots on Arctablet. Via Google+ Mini PC community. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)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. www.cnx-software.com