Port XBMC to PSP (PlayStation Portable)?

[LiGhTfasT]

hi all, just fallen in love with the psp hombrew scene and wondering if anyone has any plans to port xbmc to psp?

would be a amazing application especially being able to stream media from your pc with the onboard wireless connection

would be a nice project to carry on whats already a perfect solution

hope someone has plans for this

[Vexamus]

i'm actually quite surprised nobody's given you the, "this is an xbox site, not a psp site."

i'm not sure if any of the devs have an intention to try to get something like xbmc running on our psp's. i've been on a few of the psp homebrew forums and i've been trying to bolster support from the homebrew devs to port samba/ffmpeg over in a nice gui.

some of the current limitations are that the psp runs a max of 333mhz which may or may not be fast enough for "dvd quality" divx/xvid. however, psp video formats tend to be able to reproduce high bandwidth playback without problems/slowdowns. i personally have tested a myriad of different configurations of the psp video format(xvid video, mpeg4aac audio).

i think what would be the best solution for us is to have the xbmc'esqe program be a part of a custom firmware instead of a homebrew app. running it at the hardware level and use the 3d accellerator to render the video will open up a lot for us as far as dvd quality video and multitasking. the software renderers that are currently out just don't cut it. then again, if we had a custom firmware the crypto issue with the games and homebrew wouldn't be an issue.

i think the current xbmc code could be adapted with a lot of work as the hardware is very different. we need to get ahold of a psp sdk that contains the api for the 3d accellerator, then it's just a matter of porting samba, optimizing the current port of ffmpeg and utilizing the 3d accellerator for all rendering. then we're set.

my analysis of the networking side of the psp shows that it has a fully capable tcp/ip stack and is 100% compliant to 802.11b and then some. accessing the network shouldn't be a problem.

i'm pissed that sony has jerked us all around with such great hardware and very little freedom with it. the only reason i come here with my thoughts on the issue is that i'd really like to see one of the devs who are familiar with programming for a platform/filesystem that isn't a windows or linux box. we really need some serious experience to battle the opressiveness of sony's developement team.

apparently, there's someone working on a homebrew 100% 3d accellerated mmorpg for the psp. i'd be talking to him about the 3d api unless it was just a stupid rumor rolling around the scene.

[craigymcfly]

i was also hoping the same idea would be possible to create a "pspmc". in theory, is it all possible even with the 333mhz limitations. would mpg quality differ from xvid / divx in terms of processing speed?

[Vexamus]

the way these codecs work is that it's a trade-off between bandwidth and processor horsepower at the time of processing the file.

for instance.

mpeg2 isn't very compressed, so it doesn't take alot of horsepower from the processor to uncompressed dvd quality video, however. that being said, the throughput required for mpeg2 is rather high, and thus we realize the requirement for broadband memory access and storage access to properly support that large requirement.

on the flipside, divx/wmv/qt, etc are very compressed and require very little memory and storage bandwidth, however, they require plenty of horsepower from the processor to be able to decompress the data in real time.

with the 333mhz processor, we see the best combination of this in mp4/aac combinations, i've been able to encode dvd quality video/audio(obviously not 5.1) and play it back on the psp with no performance issues(just file size.) in my studies, i've noted also that the psp has great storage and memory access bandwidth(for instance, it can play a 1.5mbit video stream with a 192kbit/s audio stream without breaking a sweat, my 600mhz pocket pc has a hard time with this.)

also, the network processing is offloaded so we're not going to see cycles eaten up by controlling the wifi. that was a very smart thing sony has done. i've attempted to dos my psp using several attacks and there has been no performance degredation. i think this was developed this way because game sharing literally allows other psp's to boot from your umd disc over the wireless connection which requires a lot of bandwidth and a lot of processing. as far as the processor is concerned, the wifi is treated like a data storage medium when game sharing is initiated. otherwise, your psp and theirs would be seriously bogged down if the main processor handled controlling the wifi.

lastly, it is well known that psp umd discs don't run at the fully clocked 333mhz, they are actually slower than the max speed, this is for battery reasons and also that the majority of what goes into the games are gpu related. i would imagine only games that require heavy physics would up the clock speed, but we've yet to notice this. there's plenty of homebrew to kick up the clock speed even up and beyond that. but the mips processor(a scaled down version of the same one used by the ps2) is fragile and doesn't too much care for going beyond it's limits like say for example, an arm chip. intel's xscale is a good example. my xscale in my phone is a pxa250 which runs at 250mhz normal mode, and 300mhz in turbo. i run it consistenly at 590mhz and can go as fast as just over 1ghz without losing any stability. it does however draw tons of juice.

developing for mips isn't as easy as developing for an intel x86 processor. most homebrew is done in mip's assembly. but with the sce sdk we could easily compile even the most generic c or c# into mip's assembly with ease. we just have to get it. sony has... for the lack of better words, been very "us government" with the sdk, i know where it is, but it's behind a password protected, developer-only area on the dev site. i don't currently know any devs who'd have access or who'd even want to go ahead and leak us the sdk...

[craigymcfly]

so does this mean that a psp equivalent of xbmc is highly unlikely then?

[Vexamus]

no, it just means that there's a chance that the psp might have a hard time with higher compressed files. this may all be moot by the time the next version of divx is released... it is said that it is so optimized that it reduces the horsepower requirement by more than half. we shall see.

[craigymcfly]

fingers crossed that this is the case.
sounds like that i'll be converting all my videos by the sound of it

[cfscorpio]

Althought this is not a feature suggestion for XBMC it is related.

XBMC for the PSP would be probably one of the greatest homebrew additions ever to the PSP. I'm no programmer but I see no reason why XBMC couldn't be ported over to the PSP. Imagine being able to watch video in any format with dual audio track and subtitle support on the PSP. No conversion crap! Or how about watching a video stored on your wireless networked hard drive anywhere in your home. There are probably even possiblities that i'm not even aware of.

Well maybe I'm just dreaming but who knows maybe someone will read this and decide to take up this challenge.

[SleepyP]

I'm thinking that you're not the sharpest or most tech-savvy person, but I will save Spiff the trouble: This is totally unfeesible for many many different reasons.

[El Piranna]

Future pending ports:

Windows
ReactOS
XBox360
Linux
MacOS X
PS3
Wii

Put yourself in the row


In any case it's a good idea, but PSP has a good interface (it's said, i don't have use one never ) and probably could me more interesting a "remote viewer" for PSP...

One thing interesting: an XBMC PSP Theme :P