Linux development

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Revision as of 13:27, 7 February 2008 by >Gamester17 (→‎What has already been done)
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Template:Current event

Currently, a few developers on Team-XBMC have begun the porting of XBMC to Linux (and OpenGL using the SDL toolkit). The goal is for this to become a full port of XBMC with all the features and functions that are available on the Xbox version of XBMC (with the exception of Xbox exclusive functionality such as Trainers, launching Xbox Games, etc). This is a huge task, which is why we are now making this public request, seeking C/C++ programmers to volunteer in assisting us with this Linux porting development project. Whether you have contributed to The XBMC Project in the past or not, please consider doing so now. Those of you who are completely unfamiliar with XBMC can get a good overview of what XBMC offers for its end-users by reading through the XBMC article on wikipedia.org

Note to XBMC end-users! Please understand that this Linux port project is not yet mature enough for a regular end-user to play with. We can not yet give you an ETA as to when it will be useful for end-users. Respect that we can not accept any bug-reports or feature/function-requests for this Linux port yet, nor do we offer support to end-users. If you are an end-user and have any general questions or need to get something off your chest about this then please direct that towards the existing XBMC Linux port end-user discussion topic-thread in our community-forum. If, however, you are a developer or have Linux expertise, we encourage you to keep reading to find out how you can help.

What is XBMC and why port it to Linux?

For the developers who does not know this; XBMC (short for XBox Media Center, not to be confused with Microsoft's Windows Media Center Extender for the Xbox) is an award-winning free and open source media player, originally designed to run on the Xbox game-console. The GPL/LGPL licensed source code basically consist of a GUI framework that has been written from scratch by Team-XBMC, this GUI acts as a front-end control interface for several audio/video players designed for specific purposes (and those are loaded when needed as DLLs), the GUI is also the user interface to all of XBMC multimedia handling functions such as databases and sorting, etc.. The XBMC Project, (who's members maintain XBMC source code), is a non-profit open source hobby project that is developed by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain. The team of developers working on XBMC have always encouraged anyone to submit your own source code patches for new features or functions, improve on existing ones, or fix bugs.

The difference this time is that we are not asking for new features/functions, what we are asking is for the existing code to be ported so it will compile and run under a Linux operating-system (with the same features/functions that are already available on the Xbox version of XBMC). The main reasons for porting XBMC to Linux are non-technical, (so it is not that the Xbox hardware is too slow or to old for the XBMC GUI or its existing features/functions), the real reasons are that we want XBMC to get a larger end-user and developer-base, because the more people who use XBMC and help maintain the code (and skins) the longer the project will grow and stay alive. The main reason from an end-user point of view is that the Xbox can not playback native high-definition video (at 720p and 1080i/1080p), especially not if the video is encoded with a H.264 or VC-1 codec. Nevertheless, note that we will still keep the old Xbox as the reference platform for standard-definition resolution video for some time (possibly a few more years), which means that the same GUI (and skins) that runs smooth under Linux on a relatively new computer must also run just as smooth on the old Xbox hardware (or a old computer that closely matches the Xbox hardware, at 733Mhz Intel Pentium III CPU and only 64MB shared memory with supported 3D accelerator).

Skill requirements and where to start

Proficient in C/C++ programming language, and though not required knowledge of DirectX, Direct3D, OpenGL and/or multimedia programming is a plus, as well as prior cross-platform or porting development experience. You do not need to have access to an Xbox game-console or any special tools/software in order to take part - XBMC development is well underway on Linux (32-bit Ubuntu for x86).

Where do I start (Linux)?

The recommended Linux development platform is currently 32-bit Ubuntu (for x86). There is a Kdevelop project file available in our SVN (Subversion revision control system). After you've done a SVN checkout, follow the install guide in the SVN (README.linux) to setup the required packages and so on. Team-XBMC developers think that the best thing to start with is just to take a look through the source code and try to understand how it all fits together. Test things out, find what works and what does not, then try and track down why.

Alternatively, you can download a finished VMware Virtual Machine (VM) and run that in the free VMware Player (or use in VMware Workstation, or VMware Server). The VM available for download below is based on Ubuntu Desktop (32-bit for x86), and all the prerequisite software is installed (including KDevelop). Performance is not great using this, as there is no 3D hardware acceleration support under a virtual machine, however it should work good enough to get a lot of development tasks done without you having to bother with install of Ubuntu yourself. Nice is also that you can install/run VMware Player 2.0 and later under Linux as well as Microsoft Windows (including Windows Vista), 32-bit and 64-bit operating-system. The free VMware Player 2.0 and later also enables you to share data seamlessly between the virtual machine and host computer, and also allows you to directly access USB 2.0 devices from within the virtual machine, (experimental support for 2-way Virtual SMP to assign more than a single CPU to a virtual machine is also available for testing purposes).

  • Download: VMware Virtual Machine (VM) with Ubuntu 7.0.4 Desktop and KDevelop (userid/password is: xbmc/xbmc).
    • Besides from KDevelop, additional development tools included are Subcommander, Doxygen, Sysprof, and PowerTop.
      • Note! In order for the PowerTop tool to actually show data, a new kernel needs to be built by yourself.
    • Our thanks goes out to tssgery for creating and hosting this first VM for the XBMC Linux port development effort.

Hardware requirements

XBMC Linux port FAQ for developers

Can non-Linux developers also help?

XBMC can also be compiled for Win32 (Microsoft Windows) operating-systems with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 (7.1) or higher, or for Mac OS X with Eclipse, so even though Team-XBMC will be focusing on the Linux port of XBMC, it will not hurt if some people who prefer and feel comfortable with Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse as a development platform also volunteer to help with getting the Win32 port of XBMC and Mac OS X builds up to par with the Linux and Xbox versions, this as a preparation for possible future cross-platform versions of XBMC.

Why is OpenGL 2.0 needed for XBMC?

Currently OpenGL 2.0 is needed for:

  • Any deinterlacing that is not linear blending which FFmpeg does
  • Video video post-processing filtering (bicubic upscaling, etc.)
  • Non-power of two textures for the GUI (using NPOT saves a lot of texture memory)
  • Hardware accelerated YUV 2 RGB conversion (actually GLSL is needed for this, and some OpenGL 1.5 implementations provide GLSL as an extension. OpenGL 2.0 guarantees availability of GLSL).

In the future OpenGL 2.0 might also be needed for:

Other tools and resources

Though any other tools or resources are not required they can possibly help in development.

Development Tools

  • Doxygen - Source code documentation generator tool.
  • Valgrind (for Linux) - a free Linux programming tool for memory debugging, memory leak detection, and profiling.
  • Sysprof (for Linux) - a free System-wide Linux Profiler for tracking CPU usage.
  • VTune Analyzer Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer for Linux (free for non-Commercial use)
  • LessWatts.org - Projects for saving power with Linux on intel-based platforms.
    • PowerTOP - utility by Intel for detecting what Linux programs and kernel tunables are resulting in the most power consumption.
    • Tickless Idle - eliminats the periodic timer tick when the CPU is idle.
  • Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) for Linux - Threading Analysis Tool by Intel (free for non-Commercial use)
  • Intel® Thread Checker for Linux - Another Threading Analysis Tool by Intel (free for non-Commercial use)
  • Dependency walker (for Microsoft Windows) - a free program used to list the imported and exported functions of a portable executable.
  • HLSL2GLSL - library and tool that converts HLSL (High Level Shader Language) shaders to GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language)
  • SHARK (Shader Assembly Compiler) - a tool to perform conversion from DirectX 9 pixel shader assembly language into C++ code
  • AMD/ATI GPU ShaderAnalyzer - Support for both Open GL GLSL and DirectX HLSL
  • gDEBugger - OpenGL debugger and Profiler (helping to find bugs and optimize performance)
  • KAGEfx - a framework to load shader programs based on the OpenGL Shading Language contained within an XML file that holds descriptive metadata about the shader and to replace shader modules on-the-fly with respect to their level-of-detail metadata.

Development Resources

Third-party libraries

This is a list of third-party cross-platform libraries that you may or may not want to use in the porting process, you decide:

Graphics and image

  • GLEW (The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library) for OpenGL hardware support version detection
  • Anti-Grain Geometry - High Quality Rendering Engine (High Fidelity 2D Graphics Renderer) for C++
  • DirectX OpenGL Wrapper - emulates API calls through OpenGL commands and other platform specific commands in order to run DirectX 8 application running on other platform than Windows.
  • Intel Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) Library Intel's Image Processing Library
  • GLVU - cross-platform C++/OpenGL/GLUT based 3D OpenGL viewer and collection of utility libraries
    • You can use all these components together, or just take bits and pieces that do what you need
  • Glitz - OpenGL image composting library (enabling features like convolution filters and color gradients)
  • SDL_buffer - a SDL extension library that is useful when you have to re-size an image multiple times.
  • SDL_Resize - basic image resizing library, high quality output suited for pre-rendering images.
  • SDL_bgrab - SDL conversion of libbgrab (a framegrabber lib from the same author).

Interactive interface

Networking

  • SDL_net - a simple cross-platform network library

Performance

Convenience

  • SDL_Config - Library designed for reading and writing configuration (.ini) files in an easy, cross-platform way.
  • navfs - Hard drive abstraction layer C library, allowing easy directory navigation.
  • GLVU - cross-platform C++/OpenGL/GLUT based 3D OpenGL viewer and collection of utility libraries
    • You can use all these components together, or just take bits and pieces that do what you need:
      • File libs (glvu/fileutils) -C ross-platform routines for searching directories, and manipulating filenames
      • Thread lib (glvu/thread) - An OK thread library that works cross-platform
      • Timer class (glvu/timer) - Time your code to see how long stuff is taking!
      • GL Utilities (glvu/glutils) - Functions for managing textures and doing framebuffer readback and stuff
      • Other stuff . Various other handy things that may or may not be useful

Technical summary of XBMC

The basics

The XBMC code structure uses a fairly modular design (with libraries and DLLs), and we think that there are enough modules/libraries to keep a wide skill-level range of developers busy for a while in the porting of them all. So please, take a look at the source code, then with the help of our To-Do list (see further down in this article) assess where the porting stage is today and think about where and how you can try to help out. Note that we are not planning on completely abandoning the Xbox hardware any time soon - XBMC will be a cross-platform software application, using the same code on multiple hardware platforms, (the 'old' Xbox still have a good amount of years to live we hope).

Detailed technical information

For more details please visit the Development Notes section of this manual.

The XBMC source code

The XBMC source code is in our SVN repository on sourceforge.net. Full instructions for compiling/builing XBMC under Linux is available here:

Linux porting

The Linux port plan

Disclaimer: XBMC Linux port of course excludes all Xbox exclusive functionality (like for example Trainers, launching Xbox Games, etc.):

  • Milestone 1 - Get all existing XBMC functionality (features/functions) working as they already work on the Xbox version of XBMC.
  • Milestone 2 - Add Linux specific items (hardware configuration, network settings, multiple input-device support, driver packaging, etc.)
    • During this phase support will be added to also run XBMC as its own Window Manager / Windowing system (without KDE/GNOME)
    • XBMC will need to have all the built-in settings for mouse, keyboard, joystick, etc. to act as a shell (without third-party dependencies)
  • Milestone 3 - Package XBMC with a stripped version of an existing Linux distribution as a bootable LiveDistro (a.k.a. Live CD) (alternatively our own custom Distribution)
  • Milestone 4 - Native 64-bit support (AMD64/EMT64), XBMC and all its libraries to be compiled on and for 64-bit.
  • Milestone ? - Yet to be decided; after XBMC Linux port reached a certain maturity the "linuxport" branch in SVN might be merged into the "main SVN trunk.
    • At this point in time it is impossible to say exactly when and at what stage or even if this merger will ever happen.

What has already been done

  • Kdevelop project file available in SVN
    • Linux development and debug environment
  • Code fully compiles on [HOW-TO compile XBMC for Linux from source code|Ubuntu Deskop Linux (32-bit x86)]
  • GUI implementation of SDL
    • OpenGL/SDL - using the GPU, working but relies on an accelerated OpenGL version
    • SDL using 2D blitting, working but relies on computer CPU, not recommended (XBMC requires 24bpp to run, so if your graphic card doesn't have 3D accel for 24bpp -as i810 ones- then you have to compile using the option 'make sdl_2d')
  • Picture viewing working (including slideshow and it's effects)
  • SMB network shares
  • PAPlayer and its major audio decoder DLL codecs. Some codecs have still not been ported. See To-Do list below.
  • Video playback using our DVDPlayer core
    • Hardware accelerated pixel shader (RGB->YUV) with Nvidia and ATI
    • Software conversion from RGB->YUV on other graphics cards due to lack of proper OpenGL support (tested on Intel)
  • Weather
  • Basic python scripting
  • Visualization - OpenGL spectrum analyzer, Waveform, ProjectM (some issues need to be worked out)
  • Remote control support using LIRC
  • Gamepad/joystick support

To-Do

This is a To-Do list of things that still need to be done, anyone is more than welcome to help out with any of these tasks:

Major To-Do tasks with high priority

  • DVDPlayer porting to Linux - work in progress. Open Issues:
    • Partial support for external subtitles (SRT and DVD-Video/VobSub subtitles are currently supported)
    • No good support for streaming video from the internet (HTTP/HTTPS/UDP/RTSP/RTP/RTCP/RDT/SDP/MMS)
    • Deinterlacing (software and hardware)
  • Python interpreter (and python scripts/libraries) - work in progress (in early stages). Open Issues:
    • Start the same script a few times and it crashes
    • Some crashes in TransformMatrix
  • Network: Servers (FTP, Web, UPnP), Clients (FTP, UPnP, Time)
    • Also all network settings needed available to the end-user from the the XBMC GUI settings section.
  • Filesystem support is partial (local, SMB, UPnP, RTV, DAAP. TuxBox and XBMSP is currently supported)

Major To-Do tasks with medium priority

  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Development of a platform-independent wrapper interface to SDL / DirectX / OpenGL / graphic backend interfaces, particularly with respect to how this interface should be exported to visualisations (.vis) and screensavers (.xscr), etc.
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] NTSC and PAL-50/PAL-60 TV-out settings for composite, S-Video and standard-definition component
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Development of a platform-independent wrapper interface to SDL / DirectX / ALSA /OSS / OpenAL audio backend interfaces.
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Audio-output hardware settings (and if user got AC3 / DTS capable reciever or not)
    • Stereo, head-phones, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, S/PDIF pass-through, etc.
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Support USB Mass Storage disks dynamically (meaning, inserted/removed after boot)
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Visualisations: Port all existing XBMC visualizations to also support OpenGL/Linux
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Screensavers: Port all existing XBMC screensavers to also support OpenGL/Linux
    • Some kind of detection code and tags will have to be added so only supported .vis is listed under system platform
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] "My Programs" section for Linux (to launch Linux games/applications/emulators)
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] MPlayer porting to Linux

Major To-Do tasks with low priority

  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding offloading to the GPU in some shape or form.
  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Credits (make it support DirectX and OpenGL, detect platform. Plus add some eye-candy)
  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Hibernation - Suspend to Disk (STD) (code should be completly different from STR)
    • Hibernation (Suspend to Disk), only if could somehow be used to speed up the initial boot-time. See kexec
  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Suspend and Resume support - Suspend to RAM (STR) (not to share code with STD)
  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Sysinfo section under Linux for x86 computers (CPU, GPU, chipset, and HDD temperature, etc.)
  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] LCD/VFD External Display Panel support (USB/RS323/I2C connections) via LCD4Linux or LCDproc
  • [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Native 64-bit support (AMD64/EMT64), XBMC and all its libraries to compile on and for 64-bit.

Minor To-Do Tasks with high priority

  • [MINOR - HIGH PRIORITY] Fix hacks which might not work on some platforms (improve cross-platform code)

Minor To-Do Tasks with medium priority

  • [MINOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Video adapter / graphic controller settings inside XBMC GUI settings:
    • DRI configuration settings
    • xorg.conf configuration settings
    • VSYNC enabling/disabling setting
  • [MINOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Complete missing codecs for PAPlayer:
    • ADPlug
    • SHN
  • [MINOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] LIRC or alternative implementation for IR/IrDA (infrared) remote support under Linux - work in progress
    • Though maybe not possible/best, it might be smart if "IR/IrDA" could be added to SDL via CMIL for platform-independence(?).
    • Add default configurations mappings to "Lircmap.xml" of the most popular HTPC-remotes (like Microsoft RC6 MCE control-Done, Meedio X10 remote, ATI Remote Wonder, SnapStream Firefly).
    • Also add WinLIRC for IR/IrDA (infrared) remote support support under XBMC's Win32 (Microsoft Windows) build for consistency.

Minor To-Do Tasks with low priority

  • [MINOR - LOW PRIORITY] make sure .AAC plays gapless with PAPlayer
  • [MINOR - LOW PRIORITY] Support better anti-aliased text (subpixel accuracy via vertex/pixel shaders) rendering. Basic idea is to cache the characters to an 8 bit texture at 3 times the horizontal resolution, and have that texture loaded into the 3 texture slots, and use a pixel shader/vertex shader to compute the texcoords for each component of the pixel (RGB) to get 1/3rd pixel positioning and antialiasing. This can probably be extended to even more precise location by increasing the size of the texture cache (eg 2x vertical, 6x horizontal)

Cleanup To-Do Tasks

  • [CLEANUP - ALWAYS AN ONGOING PROCESS] Document (doxygenize) all of the current/existing code (using doxygen)
  • [CLEANUP - ALWAYS AN ONGOING PROCESS] Valgrind debugging (also back-port any fixes to the Xbox and Win32 code branch)

Post-trunk-merger To-Do Tasks

After XBMC Linux port reached a maturity the "linuxport" branch in SVN may be merged into the "main SVN trunk" which will require:

  • Merge dllLoader (DLL loader) and soLoader (SO loader), and rename to just "loader", (similar to MPlayer cross-platform loader library)
  • Merge "Lircmap.xml" into "Keymap.xml" (creating a sub-section in Keymap.xml for LIRC)

Mac OS X porting

Mac OS X port plan

Disclaimer: This XBMC for Mac OS X port of course excludes all Xbox exclusive functionality (like for example Trainers, launching Xbox Games, etc.):

  • Milestone 1 - Get all existing XBMC functionality (features/functions) working as they already work on the Xbox version of XBMC.
    • During this first phase XBMC will only need to be running under Mac OS X as a third-party application.
  • Milestone 2 - Port of Python scripting support, add support for the official Apple Remote with all keymap to fully support XBMC control, AC3 and DTS downmix support, port all of XBMC Virtual File System features (SMB, FTP, UPnP, XBMSP, etc.).
  • Milestone 3 - Add Mac OS X specific items (hardware configuration, network settings, multiple input-device support, driver packaging, etc.)
    • XBMC package will need to have all the built-in settings for mouse, keyboard, joystick, etc. to act as a shell (without third-party dependencies).
  • Milestone 4 - Native 64-bit support, XBMC and all its libraries to be compiled on and for 64-bit.
  • Milestone ? - Yet to be decided.

What has already been done

These are most of the major things that are already working in XBMC for Mac OS X:

  • Code fully compiles on Mac OS X Leopard (32-bit x86).
  • Full GUI implementation using SDL (minus on-screen keyboard weirdness).
  • Full-screen support (XBMC with 1080p output support that just works!).
    • OpenGL/SDL - using the GPU, working but relies on an accelerated OpenGL version
  • Picture viewing working (including slideshow and it's effects).
  • Video playback using XBMC's own DVDPlayer core (including DVD-Video menus support).
    • AC3/DTS digital passthrough is supported, (analog downmixing is not yet working).
  • PAPlayer and its major audio decoder DLL codecs. Some codecs have still not been ported. See To-Do list below.
    • (checkout HOW-TO: Debug Dynamic Link Libraries).
    • Hardware accelerated pixel shader (RGB->YUV) with NVIDIA and AMD/ATI graphics.
    • Software conversion from RGB->YUV on other graphics cards due to lack of proper OpenGL support (tested on Intel).
  • Weather.
  • Visualization - Project M OpenGL vis (some issues need to be worked out).
  • Networking (though some small issues still need to be sorted out).
  • Video thumbnail lookups; IMDb, TheTVDB, AllMusic, etc.

To-Do list for the Mac OS X port

This is a To-Do list of things that still need to be done in XBMC for Mac OS X, anyone is more than welcome to help out with any of these tasks:

Major To-Do tasks with high priority

  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] DVDPlayer porting to Mac OS X - work in progress. Open Issues:
    • Partial support for external subtitles (SRT and DVD-Video/VobSub subtitles are currently supported)
    • No good support for streaming video from the internet (HTTP/HTTPS/UDP/RTSP/RTP/RTCP/RDT/SDP/MMS)
    • Deinterlacing (software and hardware)
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] AC3 and DTS downmix support in software (for analog stereo output)
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] Python interpreter (and python scripts/libraries)
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] Network: Servers (FTP, Web, UPnP), Clients (FTP, UPnP, Time)
    • Also all network settings needed available to the end-user from the the XBMC GUI settings section.
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] Virtual File System support (work on SMB, UPnP, RTV, DAAP. TuxBox and XBMSP has not yet begun)
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] Apple Remote control support using LIRC (from macports).
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] Gamepad/joystick support (Xbox orginal wired gamepad, Xbox 360 wireless and wired gamepad).
  • [MAJOR - MAJOR PRIORITY] More OpenGL visualization - Spectrum Analyzer and Waveform.

Major To-Do tasks with medium priority

  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Development of a platform-independent wrapper interface to SDL / DirectX / OpenGL / graphic backend interfaces, particularly with respect to how this interface should be exported to visualisations (.vis) and screensavers (.xscr), etc.
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] NTSC and PAL-50/PAL-60 TV-out settings for composite, S-Video and standard-definition component.
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Audio-output hardware settings (and if user got AC3 / DTS capable reciever or not)
    • Stereo, head-phones, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, SPDIF pass-through, etc.
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Support USB Mass Storage disks dynamically (meaning, inserted/removed after boot)
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Visualisations: Port all existing XBMC visualizations to also support OpenGL
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Screensavers: Port all existing XBMC screensavers to also support OpenGL
    • Some kind of detection code and tags will have to be added so only supported .vis is listed under system platform
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] "My Programs" section for Mac OS X (to launch other Mac OS X games/applications/emulators)
  • [MAJOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] MPlayer porting to Mac OS X

Major To-Do tasks with low priority

Minor To-Do Tasks with high priority

  • [MINOR - HIGH PRIORITY] Fix hacks which might not work on some platforms (improve cross-platform code)

Minor To-Do Tasks with medium priority

  • [MINOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Video adapter / graphic controller settings inside XBMC GUI settings:
    • VSYNC enabling/disabling setting
  • [MINOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] Complete missing codecs for PAPlayer:
    • ADPlug
    • SHN
  • [MINOR - MEDIUM PRIORITY] LIRC or alternative implementation for IR/IrDA (infrared) remote support under Mac OS X
    • Though maybe not possible/best, it might be smart if "IR/IrDA" could be added to SDL via CMIL for platform-independence(?).
    • Add default configurations mappings to "Lircmap.xml" of the most popular HTPC-remotes (like Apple Remote, Microsoft RC6 MCE control-Done, Meedio X10 remote, ATI Remote Wonder, SnapStream Firefly).

Minor To-Do Tasks with low priority

  • [MINOR - LOW PRIORITY] make sure .AAC plays gapless with PAPlayer
  • [MINOR - LOW PRIORITY] Support better anti-aliased text (subpixel accuracy via vertex/pixel shaders) rendering. Basic idea is to cache the characters to an 8 bit texture at 3 times the horizontal resolution, and have that texture loaded into the 3 texture slots, and use a pixel shader/vertex shader to compute the texcoords for each component of the pixel (RGB) to get 1/3rd pixel positioning and antialiasing. This can probably be extended to even more precise location by increasing the size of the texture cache (eg 2x vertical, 6x horizontal)

Cleanup To-Do Tasks

  • [CLEANUP - ALWAYS AN ONGOING PROCESS] Document (doxygenize) all of the current/existing code (using doxygen)
  • [CLEANUP - ALWAYS AN ONGOING PROCESS] debugging (also back-port any fixes to the Xbox branch)

Post-trunk-merger To-Do Tasks

After this XBMC for Mac OS X port reached a maturity the "linuxport" branch in SVN may or may not be merged into the "main SVN trunk" and if so would require:

  • Merge dllLoader (DLL loader) and soLoader (SO loader), and rename to just "loader", (similar to MPlayer cross-platform loader library)
  • Merge "Lircmap.xml" into "Keymap.xml" (creating a sub-section in Keymap.xml for LIRC)

XBMC programming and code formatting convention guidelines

Note! More specifics to come based on ongoing discussions, see Proposed code formatting conventions for XBMC

General guidelines

  • Code documentation (DocBook, rst, or doxygen for the code documentation steps, preferably the latter, doxygen)
  • Self-containment - XBMC should be as little dependent as possible on operating-system and third-party services/deamons/libraries
    • XBMC should for example contain all file-system and network-client (like samba) support built-into the XBMC package
  • Modular design - independent modules made up by localized/isolated code libraries without dependencies
    • XBMC should still compile and run if a non-essencial module/library is disabled or removed
  • Aim for the GUI/interface to run smoothly on a low spec computer (less than 1Ghz)
    • 3D graphic controller (GPU) will always be required hardware for XBMC so try to utilize the GPU as much as possible
  • Avoid harddisk trashing (excess read/write/erase cycles), so no harddrive paging, (utilize RAM memory intead).
    • End-users will be running XBMC and the operating-system on Solid-State memory as a Live CD (LiveDistro) of a USB-key
  • Fast load and boot times for end-user perception (other thing can still run/start in the background without the user knowledge)
    • 15-seconds or less from when the end user press the power-button on the computer till he/she can browse the GUI --pike 06:00, 14 June 2007 (CEST)unrealistic goal for Linux, isn't it?

User-friendliness is next to godlyness

One of Team-XBMC major ongoing goal have always been to make XBMC and its user interface even more intuitive and user-friendly for its end-users, based on the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy. We think that usability is very important for media players like XBMC. Many user interface deciscions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design, in order to improve this, we try to listen to XBMC's end-users for how XBMC is actually being used and how we can improve the user experience. We also aim to do regular overhauls, improving existing features/functions, and scrapping outdated code and features/functions (as "to much stuff" can also be a bad thing).

XBMC as a whole must...

  • Be easy to install, set up, and maintain, (so that the end-users do not get fed up with it and quit).
  • Have an user interface simple and intuitive enough so that less geek-savvy people are not intimidated by it.
  • Be able to play audio and video files that have been compressed using divx, xvid, etc. directly out-of-the-box
  • Be able to and organize audio and video files in an easy and user-friendly way.
  • Use standards and be consistant, (the music section can for example not use completely different controls from the video section)
  • Perform actions in the GUI with as few 'clicks' as possible
  • Require little to none non-GUI configuration (and all such non-GUI config should be via AdvancedSettings.xml)
    • There is still a little work to be done here, for example RSS-feeds settings need to moved to the GUI
  • Look nice.

Mentors

Mentors are developers from Team-XBMC and members of The XBMC Project that have volunteered to assist and mentor non-official XBMC developers in any non-trivial way they can, helping you by checking, commenting and committing your code patches to our SVN source code tree. These mentors have chosen an area they prefer to specialize in, usually this is an area in which they feel they have most interest, knowledge, and expertise in. Initial patches are welcome, and can and will be merged by the team. If you wish to join the team in an official capacity, please let us know.

Linux and Mac OS X port mentors and developers

If you are a C/C++ programmer expert, porting specialist or guru and like to volunteer as a 'third-party' mentor and/or developer then please let us know.

Linux Mentors (also lead developers)

  • Yuvalt: Everything Linux
  • Vulkanr: Everything Linux
  • JMarshall: Anything GUI related, Music Library, Video Library, PAPlayer, etc.
  • D4rk: OpenGL, other Linux stuff
  • Elupus: DllLoader, Mplayer and DVDPlayer
  • Spiff: Anything other than DllLoader/MPlayer/DVDPlayer internals.
  • monkeyman 67156: Everything Linux
  • Topfs2: Everything Linux

Mac OS X Mentors (also lead developers)

Contact methods

These are developers forums for XBMC development, (programmers/coders only!).
Respect, these are not for posting feature-requests or end-user support requests!