I remember when we had issues getting xbmc to run on pc’s and it was just considered a ‘skinning tool’ for the xbox side,its come a long way this is wonderful. Good luck guys.

Cool, I really like this idea. Thanks for the post!

This isn’t capable of 1080p HD?

If that’s true then I’m afraid they’re wasting their time.

It looks like the beagleboard should be able to do 1080P H264 baseline video.

the “HD video capable TMS320C64x+ DSP for versatile signal processing at up to 430MHz” of course that means things like mplayer or vlc or va-api need to support that chip.

Now of course all of my h264 dvd rips are the 4.1 high profile, and they cause the fans in my ps3 to spinup, but they do look nice. As for this it will be a benefit to users of even x86 as it will lower the cpu consumption of the menus.

Totally the wrong hardware for such a project. While the BB can do 720 and 1080 modes, it’s CPU is too anemic to handle full movie quality h.264. They should have started this project on a WDTV which has hardware acceleration.

Sweet! This will be useful for the pandora, too.

The beagleboard is limited to 720p output resolutions, so it’s useless to argue the power of the DSP, when it’s impossible to display 1080p res out of the HDMI connector.

This would have been interesting 2 years ago, before the Ion setups (like Acer’s Revo) which comes in around the same price as the BeagleBoard and before the dozen or so dedicated media players based on Realtek’s MIPs architecture, which sell for about half the price of the BeagleBoard.

I was discussing with a friend about a year ago, working on making the BeagleBoard into a media player. I ended up buying Patriot’s streaming box (which supports an internal 3.5″ drive) and my friend bought an Acer revo. Very little work involved to “just work” but plenty of opportunity for hacking.

This work is still interesting, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a little late.

@h3llphyre:

Plenty of opportunity for hacking??

It’s a frustrating world – there are affordable general purpose computing devices with whole source trees available like the BB, but they don’t have enough grunt for modern video, and then there are the RTD1073 (etc) boxes that do have the grunt, but they’re never fully open (eg. due to use of chipset suppliers proprietary SDKs).

So either way so you can’t do your own thing with them, and there’s not nearly enough opportunity for hacking as there could/should be.

Unless you know of exceptions to the rule?