XBMC ideas

Discussion of XBMC4XBOX development.
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CygnusBlack
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XBMC ideas

Post by CygnusBlack »

This topic will serve as a permanent placeholder for my XBMC builds. I'm a computer programmer and a developer for various FOSS projects. I recently picked up another XBOX. Years ago I was an active contributer in the XBOX modding community. Since I have another XBOX now I plan to write and release better versions of this software. I use to run T3CH builds and I never had issues with RAM being freed between menus, thus I never had issues playing back HD 720p videos. The Pentium III with MMX and SSE in these boxes is more than sufficient for 720p playback if the XBMC builds freed the memory like its suppose to. I intend to fix all of these issues and more. If anyone would like to contribute to this project send me an email at CygnusArtureusBlack[[[at]]]gmail
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xman
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by xman »

http://www.eurasia.nu/modules.php?name= ... %28T3CH%29
I do believe this was the last T3ch build and you will note it was dated 31/8/2010. You may also note that there were 3 devs working on that build, one being the only remaining dev today, ExoBuZz. I do really look forward to what you can possibly come up with for the project and any help I can do, please ask but I also urge you not to forget that if it wasn't for this man, BuZz, the project would have stopped any forward progress around the time of that last T3ch build and this I honestly believe would have killed this project right there and then.
There were actually 1 current and 2 now retired members that also kept this project alive at an earlier stage, those being Dan Dar 3, he is still a very hard working and very active member on this forum. The others being Bomb Bloke and Craig. Bomb Bloke, ex Xbox Scene was a wealth of knowledge on all things Xbox and Craig did the original hosting of the previous site before he let it laps some 3 years later. It was these 3 members that rushed to get this site up and running when the split from mainline XBMC took place and it looked like the project was about to die very rapidly . When the old site went off line, who was it that took up the cause and started hosting it himself, it was BuZz.
You may be aware I am very close to Buzz regarding him as a very close friend all be it we have never seen each other face to face, I think it is fair you know this fact. I know BuZz has asked for help on this forum so he wasn't the only dev still working on the project many times but to no avail and I hope he and you could possibly work together but that would be up to you guys, that is just my wish this could possibly happen so it wouldn't be all up to Buzz on his own. Anyway, I just thought it right for me to jump in and fill in a few of the gaps you may not have been quite aware of and hopefully help this along in harmony and everyone is happy.
This project has seen many ups and downs over the years and hopefully this will turn into another up to this much loved project. Welcome to the forum and I look forward to speaking soon.
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by Xphazer »

This is a team project. So if you want to help, submit some patches, they will be reviewed and than applied to the trunk or your own branch if good.
Once you prove you're skills are good enough you will get commit access.
Keep in mind that all of the work you do should be on source control, no matter if you're working on XBMC4Xbox trunk or your own fork.
*Be very respectful of the GPL.* - I can't stress that enough.
Nothing keeps you from having your own fork, but what is the point? Much better to all work on the main XBMC4Xbox code. :smile:
Coming here trying to push your own fork before to try working as a team on the trunk certainly won't be seen as a good thing by buzz and me.
I've never seen you around reporting any bugs properly, yet you say its not working properly without any details or debug log. This doesn't work for me, TBH.

If you're trying to use Xbox for HD, you're doing it wrong! Get an HTPC. This machine will never be able to deal with some codecs at high bitrate.
It will never do 1080p, 3D or 4K so it's not a complete HTPC solution, no matter what is done.
Playback will always be limited by CPU power (not RAM!), the Xbox simply does not have the required processing power to decode some high bitrate videos.
I rather have an updated FFmpeg, python 2.7 and addons compatibility.

And to finish: "The way that we work is, you can talk all day about a great idea or a solution for a problem or something that you think is an interesting feature for Linux to have.
But you got to show us, show me something concrete, show me a piece of code that does that. Something that is tangible that I can test my self so I can try it out and I can think of what it is instead of talking abstractly about a topic all day"
-David S. Miller http://youtu.be/IvlL0JpiqqQ?t=23m32s

Please don't take anything that I just say as rude, just understand that after years of being involved in many different projects I've developed a very strong scepticism stance. :wink:
Welcome aboard anyways!
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Dan Dar3
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by Dan Dar3 »

I - just a mere small patch contributor in areas that I find lacking - don't see any problems if you want to fork and focus on the HD playback issues, although I agree in a way with Xphaser that contributing to the existing project will make things easier to support rather than a complete fork of the project to have its own lifecycle. I would find it hard to support issues from users coming for support for "CygnusBlack builds" and telling them that we don't run it, although as forum administrator(s) we could split / merge with this thread as needed.

I think it's best that we talk about your plans on TeamSpeak (here), Buzz is usually present and I will there more when back from holidays (3 weeks). Either way, another developer is more than welcome and hopefully we'll work towards the common goal.
elgato
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by elgato »

Hi guys...
with no post writing aln always as "logged off" i'm visiting this forume every day.... and it's really nice to know that new project will appear on xbox-scene :) But [ if i good understood coulege Dan Dar3] - also I think, that it would be nice / better to support corrent project [ 3.5 RC1 on which Buzz is working] than starting all over and over with opening many opened door.
Seeing xbmc with 720P playback would be something amazing....
.
.
...sorry to write it here- but if there is new project on the way- is there anny possibility to do something with some crumbled games on v1.6 xboxes? As we know - evox can handle most of these games. Maybe it's a good time to try again do something with that ?
My only support that i can share with You guys is some donate, translations [polish] and beta testing....

best regards
elgato
CygnusBlack
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by CygnusBlack »

Ok after messing around with the libraries and some of the code for a while I found that lower end HD playback is possible. I don't have a lot of time to explain right now but I will at a later time. The videos need the right transcoding specs for the box to play them at 25+ fps. I should have plenty of time tomorrow to demonstrate. I was able to get it to playback a HD 720p video with x264 with a different library and some additional tweaks at 24 fps but I had to use aac. I'm very excited!

BTW you guys did a great job on your RC2. Hopefully my stuff will make it into your next stable release. Not 3.5 but the one after because it's way off.

I'll come by your TS tomorrow.

EDIT: I don't like the new logo. The XBMC should be blue and white while the XBOX should be green like the original colors. Also since XBMC is being renamed to KODI this should preserve the original project.

Screenshot #1 http://postimg.org/image/x2ix4f925/
Screenshot #2 http://s21.postimg.org/z3cee5qo7/1409978614285.jpg
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BuZz
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by BuZz »

What code ? Please can you be more specific - I see nothing in your post related to anything that has been/would need to be changed code-wise.

Your video is not 720p h264 - it is less than 480p. 720p has a res of 1280x720. 480p has a res of ~848x480. your video is 720x404

DVDPlayer already plays back h264 at a higher res and higher bitrate than that (and at 1280x720 with MPEG4 Part 2 based codecs)

The branding has now been decided. Sorry you don't like it.
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by CygnusBlack »

I posted the wrong screenshots. I have been busy with other things.

I'd like to add some features such as extended fan configs natively as well as some gpu fan control options for the 1.0 XBOX. I plan to implement fan speed control while playing back video like automatically switching to 10% on video playback.

When I get more time I would also like to make some professional video tuts for modifications/methods and get your project here a lot of donations. I feel we could gain a bigger user-base from these video tuts and propaganda. When more people are interested there will be many donations that you could put toward site maintenance and further development of this XBMC.

Did anyone ever try GPU assisted video playback? Or maybe implementing a Linux Kernel into XBMC? It could be very small and additional libraries could be used that way.
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by BuZz »

The GPU fan is two wire right ? How do you intend to control that from software ? (without a hardware mod)

I see no point slowing down the case fan on video playback - that's when the xbox needs cooling most.

There are plenty of video tutorials out there already. Our userbase is unlikely to get bigger - this is a legacy project., the userbase has been getting smaller and smaller over the years. Donations help cover some server costs etc but there is no direct connection between donations and speed of development - No-one would be stupid enough to do this for the money :)

GPU assisted decoding on the xbox GPU ? Good luck with that. Linux Kernel into XBMC ? this does not make sense.

I'm going to change the subject of this thread as it is misleading. If you have something to contribute - send in some patches. Talking about stuff that will never happen does not help development. Thanks.
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Re: XBMC ideas

Post by professor_jonny »

Gpu assisted decoding is possible but because of the nature of the hardware being largely undocumented it makes it really hard.

Your best bet would be to look a the nvidia nouveau Project and use it as a base, Im guessing the geforce 2 chipset would largely be the same as the nv2a in the xbox graphics wise that is.

To implement it into xbmc one would have to offload math to the gpu where it would benifit from the fast fpu in the gpu, the cpu has mmx extentions and the code would need to chop and change between the two to get the best proformance, this is why software acceleration is largely used as it is so much easier as the gpu is not x86 and code translation would need to be handled to pass it onto the gpu.

If you are serious I can give you some info flirt scrips for IDA that narrate a lot of the bios's directx code from that it can be used to reverse engineer the gpu the hard way.

good luck :-)
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by spicemuseum »

CygnusBlack wrote:Did anyone ever try ... implementing a Linux Kernel into XBMC? It could be very small and additional libraries could be used that way.
Yep, read this.
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Ah come on, lets be a little more courteous please.
CygnusBlack wrote:Or maybe implementing a Linux Kernel into XBMC?
No, and probably for good reason. Xphaser here ran X-DSL on Xbox and while the screenshot shows 14.4 MB RAM usage and no swap file used to deskop looks encouraging, XBMC4Xbox will require I would think a full rewrite to port from DirectX into OpenGL and adjust / change from whatever external DLLs uses at the moment (cURL, Python etc). So by the looks of it, A HUGE amount of work in getting the thing running first, getting it to where it is now so users accept it and install it, and ten whatever more bugs will be found along the way. And I also agree with Buzz, there's no long term future for this project, I think we all are fully aware, although for one I'll keep going at it for as long as my Xbox and anybody else's still runs.

http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... f=12&t=566

It is an interesting idea though, I like to keep myself dreaming of all sorts of things so I won't shoot anyone else's down either (or I try to do it gracefully :-)), if you want to try it and have a prototype for us to run at some point, by all means.
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by BuZz »

Dan Dar3 wrote:Ah come on, lets be a little more courteous please.
No-one is being rude, just factual. This thread wasn't started as someone throwing around ideas - it was started by someone claiming they have a release/announcement and are going to do something. I think both you and spicemuseum are confused regarding the linux reference. He did not say getting xbmc4xbox running on linux - he is I believe referring to some sort of concept of having some sort of api/kernel compatibility within xbmc which is not going to be of any use (and is way beyond any sensible project scope). We already have some of the missing windows api stuff emulated for supporting dlls built on windows which is enough.

I'm always happy to review patches contributed to the project, but I am tired of discussing "what if's" over and over again (we have done the gpu discussion many times before) when they are unrealistic or make no sense.
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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [RELEASE ] New XBMC Build by CygnusBlack

Post by spicemuseum »

BuZz wrote:I think both you and spicemuseum are confused regarding the linux reference. He did not say getting xbmc4xbox running on linux - he is I believe referring to some sort of concept of having some sort of api/kernel compatibility within xbmc ....
Whoa. Not sure I'm getting this. How would it work, then? (I thought he was talking about building the application onto a Linux kernel - which is what happened with XBMC 5 years ago.)


{I'll get the quoting right in this message eventually!}
Last edited by spicemuseum on Mon Sep 08, 2014 10:06 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: XBMC ideas

Post by BuZz »

it wouldn't. and wouldn't be of any use if it would. This was my understanding of what he said anyway.

The XBOX has a partly windows compatible API. XBMC4Xbox extends that so it can load dlls (and maps missing functions). so we already have code that allows stuff to be ported more easily - hence we have librtmp, polarssl, libcurl, ffmpeg and all the other libraries which are built as windows dlls (with xbmc4xbox specific changes).
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Re: XBMC ideas

Post by AllahGodoXbox »

First thing is first I want this back http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... 620#p24620
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Re: XBMC ideas

Post by BuZz »

Please don't thread hijack.
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Movie Scrapper down.

Post by Gattler »

Thank you all for your great input and development. I wanted to post this as part of the development idea. The movies scrapper is down again. Doesn't download movie scrappers. But TV shows is all right.
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Re: XBMC ideas

Post by fxmech »

BuZz wrote:Please don't thread hijack.
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