OS X development

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Template:XBMC development nav Team-XBMC have ported the XBMC Media Center software to Mac OS X some time ago.

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 it on XBMC and XBMC FAQ.

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 10.6 32-bit x86-Intel. 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) with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and a ATI Radeon 9200/X1600, Intel GMA950, or NVIDIA 6-Series [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Processing_Unit 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

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)

See also

• HOW-TO submit a patch (where and how to submit source code)
• Mac FAQ