XBMC beagle, GSOC 2010
Well I 'promised' an update on the beagleboard gsoc 2010 xbmc whatsit, and since we've just had the 'mid-terms' and I have some spare time it seems like a good point to poke it out.
The good news of the day is that Tobias passed the midterms well - although I haven't had a huge amount of time to devote to it, he has thankfully worked very well independently. He's been working well with both the xbmc and beagleboard communities, finding relevant experts to aid the task which has let me off the hook quite a bit. He's had to spend a lot of time just on the beagleboard environment which was an unavoidable pain since the hardware arrived late - and xbmc is a mammoth bit of code that takes an age and a half to compile. But most of the code to this point has been changing the rendering system from a game-like render-all loop to a damage-based system - which could be done on a pc. Still bugs, but it's getting there. The patches look nice, and he keeps the commited code building (just as well - it takes hours to build on the target).
He's started on the video overlay system now, so i'm expecting some big improvements. Some initial timing suggests it's spending nearly 60% of it's time in the 'gpu' doing YUV conversion (i'm not sure what resolution he's running it at). The video overlay will do that for free, and more in that it reduces the memory bandwidth requirements significantly.
XBMC basically 'runs' on the beagleboard now, but can only play quite low-resolution video and there's a few issues with missing text, but it does run. With a simpler theme and the video overlay work i'm hoping it will at least be at the SD-video media player level. The XM might even manage 720p for simpler video formats like mpeg2. Although out of scope for this stage of the project, there's also the DSP sitting idle at the moment so the hardware is capable of quite a bit more yet.