Allwinner A10 : Is XBMC ported to MALI-400MP ?

WOW, I've been reading a fare bit about the Raspberry Pi, and a lot of other cheap ARM based SoC products out there and this by fare looks the most promising. The unit cost really can't be beat and the form factor is good too. I really do hope all the video decoding stuff gets open-sourced as many claim it will be . I was thinking about getting a Panda Board but now I am perhaps reconsidering. The price on A10 based solutions is ridiculously low and I hope to see more interest in getting XBMC to run in this thing. I imagine it probably already does run on it as its just another ARM chip with a MALI400 GPU. With hardware decoding this type of device has some serous promise.

Cheers,
Slice

P.S. Has anyone actually got a Linux distro and XBMC running on this thing yet?

Well, as strange as Android might seem, there should be APIs available to access the hardware. Otherwise media players like MX Video Player or Plex wouldn`t be able to handle 1080p playback just fine on it, and it would have been impossible to develop complex 3D games like GTA III (which was initially done for iOS btw) , which runs fine on the Android devices i tried.

For the record, i have a cheapo chineese tablet with the Allwinner A10 platform running ICS 4.0.3 and it`s mostly ok, don`t expect super-fast performance like on a Galaxy Nexus S or SGS S2 since it`s a single core from last year, but it`s decent.

I suspect most people here wouldn't be interested on running on-top of android. Firstly there are tons technical issues stopping that, one being that android only allows the use of JAVA based application packages, hence there is no way in hell XBMC will ever work on android unless the android folks pull there head out and allow for native code support. As for performance, I suspect once you get rid of the Android OS, it doesn't really matter...Android has quite a bit of overhead and Crap that really isn't needed if all we're interested in is a XBMC appliance (We are on the XBMC forum talking about a STB). In either case, I guarantee if someone gets a small linux distro on this thing in addition to XBMC, I suspect it would preform much better than the Raspberry Pi once the devs get the hardware video decoding stuff sorted, at the very least the UI would be faster.

Cheers,

@slicemaster, oh so wrong. google for 'android native activity'

(2012-04-15 08:06)davilla Wrote:  @slicemaster, oh so wrong. google for 'android native activity'

well that's news to me but then again i don't follow android stuff often...none the less it is encouraging. however, given the state of things as they are and the fact that there is no working version of XBMC for android (and no one working on it to the best of my knowledge), I suspect at least for the time being that a vanilla linux distro and XBMC on the A10 would be perhaps more pertinent in the short term at least, and certainly so when one is looking for a dedicated XBMC applience.

none the less the android native activity stuff looks pretty cool...

Slice

Tom Cubie from http://rhombus-tech.net announced on this list

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook

mele a1000 running ubuntu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhnupMPCH...e=youtu.be

And for some additional news.

Besides all the cheap tablets out there with the Allwinner A10 hardware, soon there will be an UMPC available aswell
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/04/16/s...0-netbook/

(2012-04-17 15:14)metric Wrote:  Tom Cubie from http://rhombus-tech.net announced on this list

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook

mele a1000 running ubuntu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhnupMPCH...e=youtu.be

So this device already is running ubuntu, only without hardware acc. Seems a matter of time before xbmc will be running on this machine..

(2012-04-25 23:13)Robotica Wrote:  So this device already is running ubuntu, only without hardware acc. Seems a matter of time before xbmc will be running on this machine..

Awesome news! That makes me want both the settop box (for XBMC) and the net/smart book version (as a replacement for my aging eeepc) with an eye towards future full hardware acceleration.

Looking forward to seeing progress continue on this.

There is another player coming on the market;
http://micdigi.com/2012/04/hyston-will-r...-solution/

So now you have about a million tablets, the Mele A1000 and A2000, the UPMC, a new STB by Hyston and offcourse still the planned EOMA-68

Some other interesting news;
A Mele A2000 will be donated to one of the XBMC dev's (on his request) to work on a port of XBMC.


(I hope they make some progress with the EOMA-68 boards, so we can order those in the near future)