Developers wanted to help port XBMC for Mac to PPC (PowerPC) processor architecture

Development to port XBMC for Linux to PPC (PowerPC) have begun and source code patches for that is available, however these developers are only focusing on XBMC for Linux, not XBMC for Mac (and no one on Team-XBMC even own a PowerPC based Mac), thus outside/third-party developers are needed to port XBMC to PPC so that is can be compiled and run on all PowerPC based Mac's out there.

For more information please see these threads in the XBMC forum:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=34439
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=32320
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=35435

Are there any C++ programmers out there who owns a PPC Mac yourselves and might be interested in this?

PPC (PowerPC) emulators could possibly make porting easier for those developers who do not actually have PPC hardware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_...l_machines

QEMU emulator looks most promising at a first glance(?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
http://bellard.org/qemu/

Quote:QEMU is an open source software simulator for x86 that can emulate systems with processors of various architectures, including 386, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc. For ARM, two emulated platforms are available -- an older "Integrator" platform, and a newly-added "Versatile" platform.

The new Versatile platform includes a SCSI hard disk controller, Ethernet card, and graphical display. According to french Debian developer Aurelien Jarno (who published a HOW-TO about installing Debian or another Linux distributions on the open-source QEMU emulator), when run on an Athlon 64 3800+, running under QEMU can perform 20 percent faster than the ARM-based LinkSys NSLU2 (an inexpensive network-attached storage appliance that is commonly pressed into service as a full Debian ARM development target).

Jarno's HOW-TO begins by describing how to download and install QEMU from CVS, to ensure that the latest Versatile platform support is included. He then configures QEMU to emulate a 10GB hard drive, and downloads a publicly shared Versatile kernel that he created (Debian ARM does not yet include a kernel that supports the image, he says). Next he downloads Debian's "Etch" installer, and bootstraps the installer using a qemu-system-arm command.

Jarno's HOW-TO next describes several harmless error messages, leading ultimately to the emulated ARM system's first boot. Jarno's HOW-TO completes the basic installation by installing a more complete kernel.

Jarno's HOW-TO goes on to explore a few more advanced topics, such as running an Xorg server, increasing the amount of RAM to the maximum supported size of 256MB, and setting up a network bridge to allow the emulated system access to the Internet. The HOW-TO closes with a list of additional resources.

The full HOW-TO can be found here (link) was first published in 2006

Is it possible to run powerpc OSX in QEMU?

I didn't turn up anything with a google search, but if it is, I'd try it out and see if this port looks feasible.

I'm not looking forward to the idea of software opengl rendering on an emulator.

I have a g4 mac mini (and a g4 powerbook) standing around at home but currently no time to write patches by myself. But if someone is interested, I could set it up with either Linux or OS X, connect it to the Internet and allow access per VNC and SMB or even ssh. I used to work allot in setups like this and it works pretty good. Just edit the files per SMB and compile via VNC.

Didn't PowerPC's end with the G5 in 2005? Apple having a change of heart with the RISC - CISC battle...
Making them roughly high end single core P4 power? Just asking as I had no luck running XBMC-Windows on a thrashed P4 HT 3.5Ghz machine of late.... 720p was a no no.

Gamester17 Wrote:Development to port XBMC for Linux to PPC (PowerPC) have begun and source code patches for that is available, however these developers are only focusing on XBMC for Linux, not XBMC for Mac (and no one on Team-XBMC even own a PowerPC based Mac), thus outside/third-party developers are needed to port XBMC to PPC so that is can be compiled and run on all PowerPC based Mac's out there.

For more information please see these threads in the XBMC forum:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=34439
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=32320
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=35435

Are there any C++ programmers out there who owns a PPC Mac yourselves and might be interested in this?

Did you find developers yet? I'm relatively free and have a ppc mac-mini that's running 10.5

woodvin Wrote:Did you find developers yet?

No developer has volunteered yet to port XBMC for Mac to PPC architecture.

Patches to port XBMC for Mac to PPC architecture would be more than welcomed!:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Appendix_D:_...ment_Notes
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMC_for_Mac...rt_project
http://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*...README.osx
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=HOW-TO_compi...ource_code

PS! An initial patch for porting XBMC for Linux to PPC has however been submitted, that patch might be of some use for any volunteer cross-platform porter:
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/5544
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=34439
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=32320

I've got a G5 that I'm trying to get XBMC to work with...

Also, is there an easy way to switch from using the bundled libraries to using the ones already on the system (ffmpeg, libogg, libvorbis, liba52, etc, etc)... I'd like to trim down the 700mb-ish download and eliminate redundencies...

You're probably best to get some info from davilla or d4rk about this, but in the meantime:

The ones that we load as .so's need to be wrapped in order to interface with our virtual filesystem. Assuming you can still run the wrapping on existing system versions to create new ones to place in XBMC/system/ then you'll possibly be OK. Note that some libraries we modify (ffmpeg for instance).

Cheers,
Jonathan

jeremyhu Wrote:I've got a G5 that I'm trying to get XBMC to work with...

Also, is there an easy way to switch from using the bundled libraries to using the ones already on the system (ffmpeg, libogg, libvorbis, liba52, etc, etc)... I'd like to trim down the 700mb-ish download and eliminate redundencies...

ffmpeg is built from ffmpeg svn source + xbmc patches. It's a static lib linked at compile.

most of the others involve source + xbmc patches or wrapping. The wrapping is a critical step that's needed to replace file i/o routine names with xbmc names. That way we can pass URL refs to libs that normally cannot handle them. Wrapping is also know as function interposing. There are plans to move this from static wrapping to dynamic wrapping. This way we can use more standard libs that already exist on OSX and do the wrapping at runtime.