Originally posted by curaga
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But the amazon-tv will look somewhat nicer next to my TV than a bare arm board + hardrive + bunch of cables. But otoh, if someone actually did make a decent pico-itx case (for the inforce boards), that wouldn't be such an issue. ;-)
I get my fire-tv on Thurs.. so I really hope we manage to root it (although, I'm pretty sure amazon has done their best to make this a hard challenge). If rooted, it could make a nice replacement for my current xbmc setup. Once we get it rooted, we should be able to use the same userspace that we already use on various other snapdragon boards and devices (dragonboard, ifc641x, bStem, etc). XBMC already runs nicely with freedreno, and software decode should be fine for up to 720p (as long as thermal throttling doesn't kick in, which shouldn't be much of a problem from what I've seen in the fire-tv teardowns). Hopefully soon someone has some time to work on hw video decode.
Compared to a phone/tablet, it doesn't have the USB OTG connector brought out, so getting at fastboot may be, umm, interesting. I'm hopefully that we manage to figure out something, although no guarantees that it isn't a hardware hack. One of my friends already has his and is playing around with trying to solder up the debug UART connector on the pcb, and trying to figure out what that 16 pad connector behind the SoC is. (My guess is some sort of connector for a debug breakout board with JTAG, and maybe if I'm lucky USB OTG.)
Fwiw, interesting factoid: amazon's open src code drop for the fire tv (aka the-big-tarball) contains a modified grub 0.97 src tree... which initially had my hopes up, but at this point it seems to be built for x86. Maybe at one point amazon had two competing designs in development in parallel, one x86 based and on with the snapdragon.
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