Big kudos to the people behind the Mac OS X port of XBMC

[petegas]

I just wanted to say congratulations on a great product so far. As someone who has enjoyed XBMC on the xbox for years, and has only moved away to using a mac for a media center because of the lack of decoding power for HD content on the xbox, this is like a dream come true.

I only stumbled across this site also because I was disgusted that my fairly new and speedy MacbookPro couldn't play 1080p .mkvs with 5.1 audio with VLC, where as my friends with their lame and slower windows laptops could, and I can't stand quicktime or trying to hunt down codecs for it.

Given the early builds of osxbmc I didn't come in with high expectations, and I was very impressed - not only the interface and features that we know and love, and not only does 1080p with 5.1 audio play, it doesn't push my cores over 75%!! (at least with the couple movie snippits i've thrown at it so far, and I set the video rendering to hardware overlays)

I don't know how you guys got the speed for 1080p where others have failed to do so, but keep it up. I'll be donating for sure, and once there is full itunes support I'll likely use little else for all my media.

One question - does setting 'hardware overlays' for the video actually offload some of the work to the gpu? What does the team recommend for playing HD video content, as far as quality vs. performance?

Thanks!

[nmirza]

i hate when people just second somebody elses opinion, but in this case the xbmc for os x is worth it, and i fully second that opinion. ive also been looking for something like this, and frontrow was not enoguh, and media portal was horrible, and then i came across xbmc and it was all my draems come true.
the only way to play 1080p flawlessly on xp is coreavc, which is a paid program, they recently released an osx version player but with no ac3 decoder, and this beats it down silly, despite being a free software. kudos for making one of the best and must have pieces for any computer.

[iordonez]

Originally Posted by petegas

One question - does setting 'hardware overlays' for the video actually offload some of the work to the gpu? What does the team recommend for playing HD video content, as far as quality vs. performance?

Read up on this page in the manual for the information you are looking for... Just make sure you are dead sober when doing it.

http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Rendering

[Gamester17]

Currently the only things offloaded to the GPU are deinterlacing, YUV to RGB conversion, and scaling.
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Linux_po...ed_for_XBMC.3F

No heavy-duty video codec decoding offloading (like XvMC or VA API) is done, see:
http://xbmc.org/wiki/?title=Hardware...Video_Decoding

[petegas]

Thanks for the replies. I knew what the differences were between the rendering modes on the xbox but not how that applied to the *nix ports or if it was different.

[elan]

Thanks for the kind feedback, glad to hear it's working well for you.

-elan

[Casemon]

Long time XBMC user (on Xbox) and just found out about this project... I tried the latest version for OSX and after I picked up my jaw off the floor, it's simply amazing...

Great work guys, keep it up!

[elan]

Glad it's working well for you, and thanks for the kind words!

-elan