XBMC ARM port teased, will manage HD playback from pocket-sized Beagleboard (video)
By Tim Stevens 
posted Nov 2nd 2009 10:05AM
posted Nov 2nd 2009 10:05AM
posted Nov 2nd 2009 10:05AM
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Why not spend an extra $50 and get a nettop w/ HD?
Read the article it said they'll have HD Playback on the release...
but then why wait when you can already do it for $50 more using AspireRevo? with full 1080p playback. When they are capable of 480p, the most they can crank out of that thing is 720p
BECAUSE GUYS!!! THIS IS DYI TECHNOLOGY!!! And We all know DYI works better, and is cheaper to make 100% of the time all of the time!! OPEN SOURCE!!!! MICROSOFT IS THE DEVIL!!! I LOVE MY IPHONE! WHARRRRRRGARB!!!
I'm not impressed. There is a company named Spawn Labs that can do all of this AND bring you video games at 720p and 30fps remotely. www.spawnlabs.com
I agree - why wait if you can get Ion nettop (Acer Aspire Revo?) with 1080p and future flash support?
Oh, wait, you don't want Windows, you want Andoid! Because ARM doesn't support Windows and I don't see any sense in limiting your software choice with similar-sized similarly-priced device (considering price of OS).
Please let there be 1080p, H264 supporting PMPs coming soon!
...Oh and please stop the idiots asking why we want 1080p support when the size of the screen is so small...
how about the idiots asking for a resolution on a screen that small stop asking for it. If you can find a 1080p screen under 22'' let me know.
Now if your asking to have the feature for video out, thats different, but you are clearly stating you want it for your tiny screen in which you would notice no difference.
Why have HD on a "small" device you say?
What? You never heard of plugging in an Archos or an iPod into a TV before?
Once storage catches up to the demands of Video, you will be able to carry your entire video library around in your pocket just like you can now for Music. That means that wherever you go you can watch whatever you want and even plug it into a hotel TV if you want.
You could even use the "portable" media player as a media server extender at home.
"Take your TV with you" when you leave for work in the morning.
@Grammar Delinquent:
It's not about the resolution of the screen, it's so that you can take that kind of video with you.
I have a hell of a lot of 720p/1080p video that I don't want to spend a s***load of time re-encoding from HD to SD just so the PMP can handle it.
Oh... and not that it matters but here you go:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/17/sanyo-epson-announce-7-1-inch-1080p-lcd-by-far-the-worlds-smal/
I gotta agree with Zach.
Though it would be geeky to get it running on something like this, I can't think of a practical reason why it would be better than either a Revo or ASRock ION 330, which definitely has the oomph for playback in a nice all-in-one package...
http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=1652
Especially the ION 330, because it has the optical drive (DVD or BluRay) and doesn't come with an OS, so you can roll your own without ever paying the MS tax, if that's your bag.
Alan,
One 'practical reason', would be that the beagleboard runs at 2W, compared to 29W at load for an Atom 230 + ION (Revo). At that point, who cares about boot times, you could leave it running 24/7. Two would be size, 3.1" x 3.0 x ??" (no enclosure), versus 7.1" x 7.1" x 1.2".
If you don't care about power and size, then you might as well build a HTPC and be done with it.
You can't get any better than 0 Watts.
Infact, I will have to get a killawat (mebbe) to confirm that a powered off Asrock 330 does infact draw no juice.
One of the handy things about an asrock 330 (versus say an AppleTV) is that it has nice accessable (and even well lit) OFF button.
It doesn't need to be on unless it's actually being used.
Watch this space for floods of "How to integrate the XBMC BeagleBoard into your LCD".
My thoughts went right to that. Integrate the thing directly into my LCD TV.
Plug one end of HDMI cable into built in HDMI socket on BeagleBoard.
Plug other end into TV/Monitor.
Simple.
Woody - not sure whether that was missing a /s or not, operative word was into, not with. Pretty sure the average engadget reader understands the concepts of plugging a HDMI lead in.
Unless there's a hardware accelerator on that board, I don't think 1080p is coming anytime soon. 720p is a stretch.
There's a Texas Instruments DSP that can be used to accelerate video playback.
It would be fine if the codecs available for the DSP were any good. They need a lot of work.
There's not nearly enough DSP on that board.
Zach this will be good for super tiny portable players
Lifehacker had a few good articles on xbmc last week:
http://lifehacker.com/5391308/build-a-silent-standalone-xbmc-media-center-on-the-cheap
http://lifehacker.com/5393227/turbo-charge-your-new-xbmc-installation
I can't wait for the iPhone 3GS port.
The X in XBMC always stood for "X" while the XB in XBMC stands for "Xbox." =)
XXboxMediaCenter?
@kevin
following the logic it would be more like "Xboxbox Media Center" :p
I always thought the X stood for cool. All the cool things had X in their name.
usually there is more than 1 X if it stands for cool, and some will be lowercase
if people really want, they can build ion nettop into a LCD.
struggling with 480 with promises to do HD.
SUUUUUUUUUUURE
well technically anything about the NTSC SD standard of 640x480 (or 720x486 if you are thinking in terms of TV resolution) is HD....so if it runs at 800x600 thats technically HD....thats what you get for using an open stupid buzz word like HD.
This video shows the interface being optimized for the PowerVR chip with OpenGLES2.0. The movie is being decoded by the CPU in this. They will offload that work onto the DSP, which can run up to 720p and possibly 1080p with very optimized codecs.
The same stutter would occur on your iPhone if it decoded video with the CPU.The iPhone offloads it to the DSP; that is where this project is going to go next.
Struggling with walking, and promising to run.
SUUUUUUURE...(stupid babies)
Why? Technological advances don't happen in a single step! The BeagleBoard is centered around the same OMAP ARM Cortex processor used in the DROID phone. The OMAP core contains both a video DSP *AND* an OpenGL graphics accelerator.
As with all open-source developments, it takes time, effort, and the cooperation of the manufacturer, in this case TI, in order to take advantage of all hardware peripherals.
TI are busy supporting paying customers, so the amount of information leaking into the community about how to drive these peripherals is limited.
It's a highly capable processor. It takes a long time for engineers working for free to bring all these features into the public domain.
Maybe not 1080p on this specific board, but there are a host of other ARM based processors coming out with much more beef for little extra power consumption. By the looks of it, this is just work in progress for "ARM" support in general (not specifically this board).
Personally, my biggest interest in this is the fact that this will run with no cooling whatsoever, unlike the Revo/ION based solution.
The Zune is pocket sized and plays HD video...
Yeah, if it's in WMV...
I don't think that any of the commentors saying "If it can't support 480i now, how will it ever support 1080p?" understand how difficult it is to get any random piece of electronics to output video. 12FPS is incredible for a first prototype- at this point it's just a question how how long it takes them to optimize the code and settle on some very slightly more powerful hardware.
YAY! another step closer to getting hd on netbooks!
Step beyond you mean? You can already buy ION netbooks like the Samsung N510 and HP Mini 311 and netbooks with the Broadcom decoder have been available for a while.
but they don't sell broadcom decoders with the models sold in asia do they? O.o im in singapore , not sure if they have it
No surprise here. It's only because of the legacy Intel-PC architecture and bloated operating systems that we need the kind of power that's in most PCs. Without those encumbrances and with some good old-fashioned optimized code, a $35 OMAP processor is plenty of power for most of the tasks that require $500+ Windows PC hardware.
Your looking at it wrong evan. Its not just the legacy PC archtecure, its the loading of Legacy APIs, multi APIs...blah blah blah so that *GASP* the OS can run a wide multitude of programs on the fly without having to load libraries and drivers!! What your asking for is an IC or something of the like. Anything doing anything in real time (like video or audio) isn't optimal to run in an OS based environment (because of the nature of how it works with interrupt requests). Their are pros and cons to either route of solving the problem. But in terms of having an open sourced based DYI system, OS is the way to go, because I'm sure there are very few DYI programmers with an IC production plant, or even know how to do low level programming like that.
actually the "XB" stood for Xbox, and technically the "X" stands for DirectX
/smartass
So what's the X in DirectX stand for?
/smartass ;)
Actually, I know the answer to this... it's the common variable name used to replace Direct3D, DirectPlay, DirectSound, etc all bundled together and called DirectX. If you follow the replacement pattern, the XBox is the PlayBox, SoundBox, 3DBox, etc. Making the XBMC, the PlayBoxMediaCenter, SoundBoxMediaCenter...
Just to clarify, the Beagle board CAN both decode and encode 720p in real-time because of the DSP in the OMAP3 processor. My guess is they haven't gotten the DSP stuff worked out and are using software codecs that take advantage of the Cortex A8 NEON extensions. TI has done a lot of work with the open source community to get this stuff working and I'm pretty sure there are open source gstreamer plugins that can move this decoding off to the DSP - it's just a matter of them getting it integrated in XBMC.
Oh, and the OMAP4s can do 1080p but TI has yet to release an open source version of the device.
And if you can't understand why you'd want to be able do this on a single 1/2" square chip that contains a CPU, GPU, DSP, memory controller, RAM, and FLASH vs an entire PC that's several orders of magnitude larger and consumes an order of magnitude more power, then I'm afraid you are a lost soul here in 2009. The Beagle Board is only as big as it is because it is an evaluation board and breaks out a lot of unneeded functionality - someone could easily come up with a HDMI dongle to do the same thing.
Well put. TI has a chip named the DM365 that can currently handle 720p video with 1080p possibly coming soon. It's in some DSC's out there that can take 2 hours of video on 2 AA batteries. They also have plenty of device in most home set-top boxes. TI definitely has the DSP technology to handle 1080p. The wow factor here is this single device can do at least 720p video and run linux on the same chip. With cell phone power specifications.
It's really not that hard to do HD video when you use a dedicated chip, cheap aiptek pocketcams have HD out for instance, if it's baked in a chip it's not a 'wow' thing, it's just an issue with the paltry atom CPU when it doesn't have a proper graphics core to use, but the actual technology is cheap and widely available.
Hell I can even get a dvd 1080p upscaling dvd player for $40, it's off-the-shelf stuff.