XBMC ARM port teased, will manage HD playback from pocket-sized Beagleboard (video)

There was a time when the X in XBMC stood for Xbox, but now just look at it. The open source project is showing up on everything from MIDs to Apple TVs and soon will be in the wild running on ARM-powered devices, with the development team posting a teaser video of the software running quite well on a tiny 600MHz Beagleboard. It's a fraction of the size of most HTPCs and, at $150, a fraction of their cost, too. Right now the software seems to be struggling a bit with what looks to be 480p wide content, but the devs promise proper HD playback in the full release -- though they're not saying when that full release will be.

[limaxray Posted Nov 2nd 2009 12:13PM]

It's not really that simple. Your example devices deal with very finite set of encoding formats allowing the use of FPGAs or ASICs. For a media player that you expect to be able to play any format you throw at it, hardware codecs won't work. The solution is to use a special purpose CPU that can perform software decoding at a lower CPI than a general purpose CPU. This is what the NVidia GPU and the TI DSP does.

[Nicnac Posted Nov 2nd 2009 12:05PM]

in addition to the doubt of this thing doing 1080p, what about full screen hulu...

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 2nd 2009 1:06PM]

Why not just buy a $99 Western Digital WDTV device? It plays 1080p content just fine from a huge list of formats.

[SuperDre Posted Nov 2nd 2009 2:18PM]

That's exactly what I thought... And it's even cheaper... hehe..

[UnclGhost Posted Nov 2nd 2009 12:44PM]

Wild ARMs?

[fortunado Posted Nov 2nd 2009 2:33PM]

I use one of these at work (in another role) and it's pretty simply to plug a HDMI + USB HUB + USB NIC + USB Storage and have a full featured media playback device.

[RR Posted Nov 2nd 2009 5:47PM]

Nice!
So we'll get XBMC on the N900 right? RIGHT? :D

[Dillon Posted Nov 3rd 2009 11:52PM]

Silly Engadget, it was X AND B that stood for Xbox