XBMC 11 "Eden" [LWN.net]

XBMC 11 "Eden"

Posted Feb 9, 2012 10:19 UTC (Thu) by twm (guest, #67436)
Parent article: XBMC 11 "Eden"

The state of VAAPI support in XBMC is a good bit more complex, and somewhat less rosy, than this account indicates. There is good support for some Intel chipsets, which have native support for VAAPI. ATI/AMD hardware is supported via a wrapper to AMD's own XvBA acceleration API, and this wrapper has been abandonware since this spring, when its developer switched jobs. I can say from personal experience that it is more trouble than it is worth. I have given up on acceleration for my Hudson HTPC until native XvBA (currently in an unofficial repo) lands—and it won't be in Eden. NVidia's own VDPAU API is used for their desktop hardware, and reportedly works well. XBMC has long had native support for this API; I don't know why you'd use it as a backend to VAAPI. Those building a HTPC with XBMC in mind would be best served with an NVidia card.

It is also implied that VAAPI is used for acceleration on the Raspberry Pi. OpenMAX is the video acceleration API used on the Pi. Is there now an OpenMAX VAAPI backend?

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XBMC 11 "Eden"

Posted Feb 13, 2012 16:33 UTC (Mon) by charlieb (subscriber, #23340) [Link]

> Those building a HTPC with XBMC in mind would be best served with
> an NVidia card.

As long as you are very clever, very lucky, or don't want audio over hdmi

http://www.google.ca/search?q=hdmi+audio+ion

XBMC 11 "Eden"

Posted Feb 15, 2012 17:13 UTC (Wed) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]

Not sure how lucky I was, but audio over HDMI now works for me on a Revo R3700. It took a bit of fiddling, and I'm not entirely sure which change did it, but I'm happy to tell people what my current settings are.

Gerv

XBMC 11 "Eden"

Posted Feb 16, 2012 17:56 UTC (Thu) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

I wish I had read your comment two weeks ago, because I bought a Sapphire Edge-HD and discovered at once that audio over HDMI doesn't work >_<

Does anybody know if one of the more recent Linux distros have it work out of the box? My Ubuntu 10.10 + XBMC 10 doesn't seem to be able to work...

Rehdon

XBMC 11 "Eden"

Posted Feb 18, 2012 1:30 UTC (Sat) by s0f4r (subscriber, #52284) [Link]

> "Those building a HTPC with XBMC in mind would be best served with an NVidia card."

Wholly disagree. I've been running xbmc 10.0 since forever on a plain core2duo with Intel GFX, and I have absolutely no problem playing 1080p content - my xbmc hooks into a mythtv backend which records & plays OTA DTV at 710p and 1080p.

Sure, it's not an ATOM, and the cpu takes 12-14% while playing the content, but it definitively does not need more oompf to just play any type of content.