Taehyun Kim, a developer working for Inisoft (Korea), has been working on video hardware acceleration on Diceplayer for Telechips TCC8925 processor (The one used in CX-01 and Zero Devices Z900) and call this player from XBMC. He has uploaded a video to demo his progress and that’s pretty impressive.
You can try it yourself by downloading and installing the following apps:
- xbmckor-armeabi-v7a-20120821.apk (Korean version). [Update: Kim has also uploaded the English version].
- Diceplayer – Free app via Google Play
You’ll also need to create a file called playercorefactory.xml in /sdcard/Android/data/org.xbmc.xbmc/files/.xbmc/userdata directory with the following content:
<playercorefactory>
<players>
<player name="MPC-HC" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>com.inisoft.mediaplayer.a</filename>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
</player>
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
<rule video="true" player="MPC-HC"/>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>
I’ve tried it in Zero Devices Z900. The default language is Korean, but you should manage if you’re familiar with XBMC interface. When you play videos, you lose the usual XBMC interface, as those are played in Diceplayer. I haven’t connected external USB storage to the device, and I’ve tried it over samba, so because of the limited Wi-Fi bandwidth, 1080p videos could not play smoothly at all, but Kim said he can play 42Mbps H.264 High profile samples via Ethernet, using a Telechips TCC8925 set-top box development platform.
Diceplayer is close-sourced, but Kim provided a patch for XBMC (http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/13267). He Apparently used stagefright-openmax for the implementation in Diceplayer. I suppose something similar might be achievable with other players such as MX Player, as the XBMC patch is just a few lines long and calls Diceplayer.
You can follow the discussion on XBMC forums if you wish.
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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NFS will give you almost 3 times the transfer speed smb does. you can install hanewin for windows and mount the share in your android.
I upload english version of xbmc-external-player to
http://vpn.inisoft.co.kr:8000/public/xbmcapp-armeabi-v7a-debug.apk
@MCG
If you mount NFS share on android, diceplayer can play with local path.
@MCG
Yes you’re right, but this may not be possible for everybody if you have other players that only support SAMBA in your LAN. However, if your shares are read-only, I suppose it should be OK to have the SAMBA and NFS servers for the same directories.
I’ve tested the Wi-Fi connection in my LAN with SAMBA and HTTP, and the speed difference is not that great. I think 1.3 MB/s (~10 Mbps) vs 1.5 MB/s (~12 Mbps), so the bottleneck must really be the Wi-Fi connection. Other mini-PCs I’ve tried are only marginally faster (~15 Mbps).
@Taehyun Kim
Thanks. I’ve updated the post.
Why is this being written for an external player and not as a patch for XBMC’s player?
@.jon
XBMC is not a normal android app. It heavily depends on internal UI framework.
It is very hard to add hw decoding and rendering to XBMC android.
@Taehyun Kim
Why it’s difficult to add hw decoding to XBMC android ?
@Amber
Android does not have standard renderer and codec interface.
xbmc structues is not suitable for android media framework. There are no java code in android xbmc.
But it’s possible to use OpenMAX for H/W acceleration with standart XBMC player (except Amlogic, Rockchip and Allwinner) ?
@Amber
See xbmc forum thread. There are no hw accelerations.
I see some amlogic related code.
ODROID-X and Diceplayer/XBMC
see http://youtu.be/EM3F_WXiIvg
@Taehyun Kim
It looks good. I have an ODROID-X board here, do you have the samples for me try?
Or can I just download diceplayer and use the previous XBMC release?
@Taehyun Kim
Nice!!!
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
If you have wifi module, you can use market version of diceplayer.
Hardkernel will include special version of diceplayer in future release of odroid android image.