XBMC May Soon Run On Top Of Wayland

The XBMC media player may soon be supported to run directly atop the Linux KMS interfaces as well as the Wayland Display Server.

This weekend at the SCALE 10x event in Los Angeles I caught up with Cory Fields of the XBMC project. He was showing off XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi. This was my first time seeing the Raspberry Pi running first hand, which was the $35 model that has a 700MHz ARM processor, VideoCore IV graphics, and 256MB of RAM. XBMC was running well on this low-cost ARM platform -- the video playback was smooth and reliable with the only area where the performance was struggling was the video overlays for the on-screen display. It's hopeful though that the OSD performance issue will be figured out soon for XBMC on the Raspberry Pi.

Besides checking out the Raspberry Pi, I also talked with Cory about any ambitions for bringing this popular open-source media player to Wayland. He mentions that this work is on his TODO list. He doesn't think having Wayland support will be a challenge and he hopes to begin working on it soon. XBMC effectively is its own tool-kit and is already abstracted enough to run on multiple platforms cleanly. He's thinking it will not be too much trouble adding Wayland support.

Beyond the Wayland support, he's also wanting to get XBMC running directly on a Linux KMS frame-buffer. (He's previously made XBMC to work on top of DirectFB too.) He mentions getting Wayland to work directly with KMS shouldn't be too hard at all and cited Jesse Barnes' guide to hacking with EGL and KMS as almost being a copy-and-paste scenario in the case of this media player. He expects this to not take more than a weekend and hopes to get around to working on this -- along with the Wayland support -- in the near future.

Lastly, XBMC 11.10 "Eden" Beta 2 was officially released today. You can read about this latest development release of XBMC 11.0 on XBMC.org. This release has fixes for unencrypted Blu-ray playback, AirPlay, TMDB scraping, and other popular items.