Monthly Archives: October 2014

XBMC (from Debian) running on MIPS CI20 dev board

XBMC on CI20 MIPS dev board

Imagination Tech kindly offered many developers (including me) a CI20 development board which let me play with XBMC on it a bit and patching it alive. The OpenGL GUI works smoothly, but video can’t be played due to crashes in FFmpeg/Libav/libva libPVROGL_MESA.so (See bug report here).
The patches needed  are sent to upstream and the latest Debian package already ships them.

Big part of the credits go to Cory Fields who created the first MIPS patches I found and updated for latest XBMC code. Thanks!

update:  Both Kodi 14.0 and XBMC 13.2 crash in libPVROGL_MESA.so which library is closed source thus I can’t debug it further.

update 2:  The crash is fixed in latest beta image from Imagination Tech which makes XBMC from Debian able to play videos using software rendering:
xbmc-mips-sw-render

update 3: Kodi also runs with with the patches sent upstream:

kodi-mips-sw-rendering

update 4: Patches for Kodi have been merged!