OS X development

 

You should read about XBMC development before reading this page.

Introduction

Team-XBMC have ported the XBMC Media Center software to Mac OS X over a year ago (for OpenGL using the SDL toolkit), this port is almost as feature complete as XBMC for any other platform and it is currently running very well and stable enough for all people to enjoy using it. The long term goal of Team-XBMC is that downloading XBMC for Mac will become a full port of XBMC with all the features and functions that are available on all other XBMC platforms (with the exception of Xbox exclusive functionality such as Trainers, Xbox Game-Save Manager, launching Xbox Games, etc.), so downloading XBMC for Mac will be one version of a multi-platform software.

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.

Note to XBMC end-users! You can help too by downloading XBMC for Mac, testing it, and reporting bugs and issues. Also, spread the word about XBMC for Mac to your friends and family, we are sure they will enjoy it too. XBMC is free and do not contain any spy-ware nor add-ware.

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 article on wikipedia.org

What is XBMC and why was it ported to Mac OS X?

XBMC (formerly called "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 center and audio/video player, originally designed to run on the Xbox game-console. The GPL 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.

Where to start helping out?

End-users (non-programmers)

You can help too by downloading XBMC for Mac, testing it, and reporting bugs and issues. Also, spread the word about XBMC for Mac to your friends and family, we are sure they will enjoy it too.

Developers (programmers)

You should be proficient in C/C++ programming language, and allthough not really required knowledge of OpenGL or multimedia programming is a plus, as well as prior cross-platform or porting development experience. You will not need to have access to an Xbox game-console or any costly special software in order to take part. XBMC development of this port is well underway for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) 32-bit x86-Intel or PPC (PowerPC).

The Mac OS X development platform is Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) 32-bit x86-Intel or PPC (PowerPC). There are Xcode (and Eclipse) project files available in our SVN (Subversion revision control system). After you've done a SVN checkout, follow the install guide in the SVN (README.osx) 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.

Hardware requirements

• 32-bit Intel (x86-processor) or PPC (PowerPC) based computer with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and a ATI Radeon 9200/X1600, Intel GMA950, or NVIDIA 6-Series 3D GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), or later, (XBMC GUI requires at least OpenGL 1.3 support to run smoothly at an acceptable frame-rate in standard-definition, to run XBMC high-definition a more modern GPU is recommended).

XBMC for Mac OS X port project FAQ for developers

Can non-Mac OS X developers also help?

XBMC can also be compiled for Linux and Microsoft Windows operating-systems.

• XBMC for Linux port project
  • HOW-TO compile XBMC for Linux from source code
• XBMC for Windows port project
  • HOW-TO compile XBMC for Windows from source code

Why is OpenGL 2.0 recommended for XBMC?

OpenGL 2.0 is not the current minimum requirement to run XBMC for Mac OS X, as XBMC will today run with only OpenGL 1.3 + GLSL support (everything else has fall-backs to be runned in software on the CPU, slower than GPU hardware though), however if the future XBMC might be able to take futher advantage of OpenGL 2.0 to speed up video decoding and such.

Currently OpenGL 2.0 hardware is only needed for:

• Any deinterlacing that is not linear blending (which FFmpeg does in software)
• 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 a few GPU hardware implementations as low as OpenGL 1.3 does provide GLSL as an extension. OpenGL 2.0 guarantees availability of GLSL).

In the future OpenGL 2.0 might also be needed for:

• More video post-processing filters to improve visual quality perception.
• Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding (using the GPU hardware to assist with video decoding)

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:

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)