Android development

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XBMC for Android has been announced on July 13th, 2012: http://xbmc.org/theuni/2012/07/13/xbmc-for-android/ and Android FAQ

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Template:XBMC development nav You should read the Development Notes before reading this page.

XBMC is a huge open source project and it takes loads of people working together to maintain it for all platforms, that is why Team-XBMC is always on the lookout for C/C++ programmers to volunteer in assisting us with the development of XBMC. 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 the features and functions that XBMC offers for its end-users by reading through the XBMC page.

Compiling XBMC

Skill requirements and where to start

Proficiency in C/C++ programming language and, though not required, knowledge of OpenGL and/or multimedia programming is a plus, as well as prior cross-platform or porting development experience. Familiarity with the Android SDK and NDK is also a bonus.

A good understanding of JNI is highly recommended, since many operations in the Android environment require specific actions from the developers, that are not necessarily common in typical native code. These include:

  • Not being able to directly access the content of VM objects through direct native pointers. E.g. you cannot safely get a pointer to a String object's 16-bit char array to iterate over it in a loop.
  • Requiring explicit reference management when the native code wants to keep handles to VM objects between JNI calls.

Supported Development Platforms

  • Ubuntu 11 or later

Once available, the code can be obtained by cloning the xbmc git repository hosted on Github.

After obtaining the code repository, follow the compilation/development guide in the new repository to setup the required packages and so on. Team-XBMC developers opinion is 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.

Hardware requirements

  • x86-based computer. No other special hardware is required for development. For Android devices, either a virtual or hardware device can be used for development.
  • If using Mac OS X, this library from Intel is likely to be very helpful for hardware acceleration of a virtual Android environment.

Development Progress

Porting Libraries

The following is a list of libraries which XBMC relies upon.

Library Progress(%) Comments
SlingboxLib 0
UnrarXLib 100
addons 100
afpfs-ng 0
asap 0
cmyth 0
cpluff 100
cximage-6.0 100
enca 0
ffmpeg 100 See here, here and many other sources including Play
freetype 100 See here
libRTV 0
libUPnP 100 See here and here
libXDAAP 0
libapetag 100
libass 100 See here
libbluray 0
libcec 0
libdvd 0
libexif 100
libhdhomerun 0
libhts 0
libid3tag 100
liblame 100 See here
libmad 100
libmicrohttpd 100
libmodplug 0
libmpeg2 100
libnfs 100
librtmp 100
libshairport 0
libsidplay2 0
libsquish 100
nosefart 0
snesapu 0
stsound 0
timidity 0
tinyXML 100 See [1]
vgmstream 0
xbadpcm 0
xbmc-dll-symbols 100

See also