(2012-11-05, 20:29)Dave_qp Wrote: (2012-11-05, 06:19)davilla Wrote: Pivos did not 'buy' it
They might as well have, ARM support here seems to be just an extension of the Pivos sales team
(2012-11-05, 06:19)davilla Wrote: What Pivos will not do is provide prebuilt binaries to competing hw vendors.
Competing hardware vendors should be linking to the XBMC ARM android/Linux build guide here on the download page... oh wait...
Unfortunately I am now resigned to wait for Ouya
You're pissing off the guy who's working to make XBMC run on all boxes, and who's one of the first people to make sure that Pivos makes all their code available to the public.
I'll tell you this, I don't get a single dime from Pivos, and it doesn't matter to me personally if they are successful or burn to the ground. I'm a cheap SOB who has little regard for brand loyalty and only cares if it works or not. I think it's great that Pivos is working so well with the open source community, but I do not feel indebted to them. When I recommend a Pivos box to someone it is because it is the best option right now. I've been burned on cheap Android boxes before, and some of this stuff isn't even safe to connect to your TV.
At the same time, I've encouraged discussion on getting other Android boxes to work, and I've even donated a little money to other people's efforts to bring quality Android box hardware to market. I'm not alone on that either.
Allwinner A10 Android boxes (like the MK802) had great potential to be another key XBMC target, and we had developers specifically going after them and asking Allwinner for help and support. You know what Allwinner did? They lied to our developers and strung them around. So don't go blaming Team XBMC for not having other ARM chips being supported.
The unfounded paranoid bullshit spewing from your mouth and the mouths of others like you is one of the reasons it is so hard to get open source groups and companies to work together. A lot of developers don't want to deal with the baseless accusations, and development suffers for it.
Pivos is not just building XBMC binaries, they're also testing them, tweaking them, and doing a ton of leg work needed to make a polished distribution. They also build and test and tweak the Android FW for their boxes too, and pay for licenses for various codecs so they can legally sell their hardware, as well as make sure their hardware conforms to the standards of those codecs. They also make sure that whatever factory is building their box isn't taking shortcuts like not installing voltage circuit protection to save money (Most MK802 sticks that run A10 chips do not have voltage protection on their HDMI port, meaning they could potentially fry your TV). Code is open source, but the time and effort to make sure it works well and that people are happy is not open source.
When other companies start doing their own leg work and QA testing, and actually have a nice working product, then I would be glad to recommend them as well.