XMBC is a free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. Some people are currently working on porting it to the Raspberry Pi board.
They posted a video demo on their forum and I uploaded the video to YouTube for those interested in seeing the progress. The video just shows XMBC booting, then accessing the menu and showing the Videocore GPU is detected. This is still work in progress, but it looks promising.
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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cnxsoft,
I love your website, and this blog is in my RSS feed for all news related to the embedded world.
I also respect the XBMC developers a lot, but I am willing to wager that this is a project which will go nowhere. I would love to see XBMC up and running on a low cost embedded platform, but the Raspberry Pi is not that platform.
The SoC used in the Raspberry Pi is the same as that used in the Roku 2s. That SoC seems to support only H.264 decode. People using XBMC want to decode multiple video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 [ DivX / XViD ], VC-1, Real Media etc.) like what the Sigma and Realtek decoder SoCs do. They are going to be disappointed with a solution which only decodes H.264.
I just wish the XBMC developers involved in this porting do more research on the target platform before investing time and effort in getting XBMC up and running.
@Ganesh @ AnandTech
Hi Ganesh, I’m happy to see an AnandTech blogger comment here.
I was not sure about the Broadcom BCM2835 supported video codec. But apparently you tried to play some video files on the Roku 2 XS – http://www.anandtech.com/show/4903/roku-2-xs-review-streaming-videos-and-casual-gaming-on-the-big-screen/7 – and many files could not be played on the device.
However, I’ve seen some other places where it says the Roku 2 XS can support both H.264 and VC1 codecs @ 1080p and WMV9 (ASF, WMV) @ 480p (But strangely not on Roku website, where it says it only support h.264). The Roku 2 XS also gets reasonable reviews on Cnet and Amazon by customers, but maybe they use online services rather than playback videos in the LAN.