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!

24 thoughts on “XBMC (from Debian) running on MIPS CI20 dev board

  1. Pingback: MIPS Creator CI20 Development Board is Now Available for $65

  2. steve

    Bálint

    I am also trying to install xmbc on ci20 – but probably without your technical wherewithal. Could you possibly write down a series of steps to go through to install it? I tried apt-get install xbmc as a shot in the dark but predictably it didn’t work.
    Steve

    Reply
  3. steve

    Balint

    Thanks so much – it works now on wheezy. Just incase anyone asks, the install command I used after enabling wheezy-backports was:

    aptitude -t wheeze-backports install xbmc

    Steve

    Reply
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  10. Gennaro Capuozzo

    It still coredumps with every kind of video (xvid, x.264 within .avi/.mkv).
    Audio (mp3) works but with a slight amount of noise (cracks) during the playback.
    Tried both local and UPnP sources.
    Not usable, at the moment.

    Reply
    1. Réczey Bálint Post author

      LibCEC support is enabled in the XBMC build thus it should work if it works on the board. I have not tested it because I don’t have the HW for testing.

      Reply
  11. Harley

    Congratulations Balint!

    MIPS port patches tested on CI20 development board have now been merged into upstream Kodi/XBMC mainline master.

    https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/5570

    This means that Kodi/XBMC now officially support running on MIPS SoC, so far only with software video decoding.

    Thank you Balint!

    Reply
  12. Maik

    Hey, great work!
    Could you please explain to me, how you installed the latest version of kodi? Currently I have v14.0 (Jan 5 2015) running on my ci20, installed through APT. I tried to install the latest version from git, however I get an error at the configure command 🙁
    Thanks

    Reply
    1. Réczey Bálint Post author

      v14.1 does not support MIPS yet since the MIPS patches have not been ported to the Helix branch. I have not updated the Debian packages where the needed patches are carried because I hope that the packages will be accepted in a few weeks to the official Debian repository and I can make the update there.
      If you are interested in updating the package please check Debian Developers’ Corner.

      Reply
  13. YULI

    Now wonder how hard it will be to convince the OpenELEC guys to add support for MIPS and the CI20 board

    Reply

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