View Full Version : popcorn hour OR istar mini as dedicated decoder/stream source
I've been researching these devices and people have been really impressed with how well they tackle just about anything video thrown at them... there's no hope of getting XBMC to run on them, and that's not what this post is regarding. I was thinking, it might be possible to let one of these devices act as a dedicated decoder and have XBMC frontend the experience, doing post processing and the like..... thoughts?
--B
I'll dig up some reviews/specs etc, but here's a good info resource: http://www.networkedmediatank.com
rodalpho
2008-03-07, 01:28
The popcornhour and XBMC do basically the same thing, except XBMC is all software and popcornhour is all hardware. I wouldn't hold my breath for the devs to implement external decoders in XBMC; they don't even support windows DLLs through loaders for ideological reasons.
You can share media on the popcornhour via upnp or SMB to XBMC, though, and vice versa.
I do realize that they are basically trying to provide the same functionality. Its just a shame that the sigma design folks don't release one of their chipsets on a PCI card along with some drivers. Obviously, their hardware works just fine with linux. When you've got a $200 hardware appliance that is running linux and can decode 1080p flawlessly and silently it just makes me wonder if we could take advantage of it somehow (from the XBMC front).
rodalpho
2008-03-07, 03:03
Don't see why it wouldn't be possible, if they released a PCI card, drivers, open-sourced the SDK, and the developers added offloading support. Thing is, that's a lot of ifs.
Gamester17
2008-03-07, 12:57
I was thinking, it might be possible to let one of these devices act as a dedicated decoder and have XBMC frontend the experience, doing post processing and the like..... thoughts?There is no hope for that either, network will not handle it so be moot to discuss it, read:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=9487
if they released a PCI card, drivers, open-sourced the SDK, and the developers added offloading support.Yes only that could be possible (in the future), if Sigma Designs or Broadcom (or someone else) sold dedicated hardware-decoder-chip on a PCI/PCIe-card that could be plugged into the computer that XBMC is running on, read:
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Hardware_Accelerated_Video_Decoding
and
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2008-February/thread.html#42156
contrinued here
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2008-February/thread.html#42283
and
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi
Gamestar, thanks for providing the links.
Some of the discussion in the that first thread was in regards to the limitations of the XBOX hardware. The HDHomeRun is an appliance with two ATSC tuners that streams HD over the network and is working beautifully for its users. I'm not implying, however, that it transmits raw video (I don't know how exactly its doing it).
Gamestar, thanks for providing the links.
Some of the discussion in the that first thread was in regards to the limitations of the XBOX hardware. The HDHomeRun is an appliance with two ATSC tuners that streams HD over the network and is working beautifully for its users. I'm not implying, however, that it transmits raw video (I don't know how exactly its doing it).
I've got one of these, I'm pretty sure it's jsut passing the still compressed video over the wire, no way is it passing the RAW video. It's only got a 100meg NIC and can handle two streams of HD at once. I'm waiting for a good tut on XBMC with a Myth back-end to start playing with it more:D
Don't see why it wouldn't be possible, if they released a PCI card, drivers, open-sourced the SDK, and the developers added offloading support. Thing is, that's a lot of ifs.
As of right now, Sigma won't open up the SDK. You have to be a VAR or hardware manufacturer in order to get access to their proprietary source, as far as I know.
I've got an EVA-8000 device from Netgear, and there's a lot of buzz in those forums about how Sigma won't let anyone see their code.
The Netgear developers are pretty much at Sigma's mercy when it comes to certain problems.
Honestly, I don't understand how this would hurt Sigma at all from an Intellectual Property point of view.
The more people that can program for their architecture, the more people will buy their chips. Who cares if we know how to program for your hardware? Do they think someone will be able to design their own competing chip based on Sigma's source code?
Anyway, as of now, unless someone wants to set up XBMC as a corporation and front the cash to buy a bunch of Sigma chips, that's out of the question.
-Wes
rodalpho
2008-03-10, 08:18
XBMC is open source, no reason why syabas or sigma or whoever couldn't build a linux-based device and use it with their own decoder. That would be pretty bad ass. Although, CPUs are getting cheaper and faster every day, and in a year or three hardware-based solutions will be entire unnecessary when $29 computers on a chip can decode 1080p through software.
Gamester17
2008-03-10, 14:49
I think that Broadcom make better suited chips for PCI/PCIe-adapters in computers, see BCM70010 and BCM70012:
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Consumer-Electronics/Media-PC-Solutions/BCM70010
http://www.broadcom.com/collateral/pb/70010-PB01-R.pdf
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Consumer-Electronics/Media-PC-Solutions/BCM70012
http://www.broadcom.com/collateral/pb/70010_70012-PB01-R.pdf
Broadcom even has a chip called BCM70020 which handles Blu-ray AACS and BD+ (DRM encryption) processing, and real-time video encoding/transcoding (for Live-TV recoding to harddisk):
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Consumer-Electronics/Media-PC-Solutions/BCM70020
http://www.broadcom.com/collateral/pb/70020-PB01-R.pdf
What you also have to remember that the off-loading code would not actually be implemented into XBMC but into FFmpeg (http://www.ffmpeg.org) (the LGPL open source codec suit that XBMC uses). FFmpeg (http://www.ffmpeg.org) is used by hundreds, if not thousands, of open source and closed source software and hardware, so if Broadcom and/or Sigma Designs chips where supported by FFmpeg then their marketshare has the potential to grow to those areas, an argument would could maybe convince commercial companies like Broadcom and Sigma Designs to change their minds about supporting FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS) like FFmpeg.
FYI; ASUS (AsusTek) is apparently working on their own FFmpeg compatible adapter, see FFmpeg-developers mailing-list (topic "HELP"):
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2008-February/thread.html#42156
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2008-February/thread.html#42283