GeeXboX

Sorry for the inconvenient but our mailing lists are down due to some server upgrade issue. We’ll working hard on fixing them along with a new server upgrade. Stay tuned !!

UPDATE:

Since July 2011, the OpenBricks mailing lists are now handled by Google Groups for various reasons. Everything should now be back to normal. All already subscribed users should have received a mail to subscribe back to the new lists. If it ain’t the case or if you’ve haven’t already subscribed, it’s never too late, so feel free to check our Mailing Lists page.

Linaro was kind enough to invite us to attend the recent Linaro Development Summit (colocated with Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, May 9-13 2011). I showed off our latest developments during the Linaro Technical Showcase, demoing GeeXboX running on IGEPv2 (OMAP3), PandaBoard (OMAP4) and x86, with different media center frontends. I noticed that the view of XBMC smoothly running on PandaBoard drew a lot of interest from the public There was also a contest: the GeeXboX demo was voted “2nd best”, and I went home with a couple of nice prizes… hopefully you’ll soon see GeeXboX running on the brand new Snowball board by ST Ericsson.

Thanks again to Linaro for sponsoring the trip and arranging an awesome conference and showcase!

We plan to release shortly the images used during the demo, so stay tuned

After reading the OpenBricks announcement you may be wondering what will happen to GeeXboX now. In short: we will continue to develop GeeXboX as before and nothing should change for our users. What will happen though (has already happened actually) is that the day-to-day GeeXboX development will move into the OpenBricks repository – the GeeXboX repository will now be updated for releases only. For details on how to access the new repository please refer to the Development page on the OpenBricks website. The GeeXboX mailing lists will remain active, but we invite you also to subscribe to the OpenBricks lists to remain up-to-date with the developments.

The GeeXboX team is happy to announce the “Day 1″ of the OpenBricks Embedded Linux Framework project. Formed by members of the GeeXboX multimedia distribution, OpenBricks is an enterprise-grade embedded Linux framework that provides easy creation of custom distributions for industrial embedded devices. It features a complete embedded development kit for rapid deployment on x86, ARM, PowerPC and MIPS systems with support for industry leaders.

OpenBricks is a complete OpenSource and non-profit project which aims at bringing a coherent Linux distribution to run on as many embedded devices and architectures as possible. As much as possible, it tries to rely on standardized technologies, protocols and FOSS as to provide the most code re-usability. It can be used as a framework basis to build your very specific Linux distributions, corresponding to your exact and specific needs, whichever you’re trying to build a Set-Top-Box, a touchscreen based multimedia tablet, a NAS, a router or whatsoever. Porting your board to Linux and adding your specific programs never has been so easy and one can easily create its own distribution flavour.

The OpenBricks project targets various hardware architectures on runs on most of the embedded boards reference design. It has been sponsored and helped by various semi-conductor manufacturers such as Texas Instruments (TI) on OMAP3 and OMAP4 chips and nVidia with Tegra250. We’re continuously looking for new devices and boards to be supported by OpenBricks and sponsoring is the way to go. Having your board or SoC supported by the OpenBricks project is only a matter of sponsoring reference designs. We’re currently looking ahead to support some additional chips, including but not limited to Intel CE4100 and CE4200, Marvell Dove and Armada, Freescale i.MX5x and Qualcomm SnapDragon. If you can provide us any help with accessing to such devices and reference boards, we’ll be glad to have them supported.

There are new stable releases for our libraries. For libplayer and libvalhalla there are many changes. Note that the major versions of both libraries were increased because the changes affect the ABI. The previous stable releases can be still used safely, but it is encouraged to update your applications against these new versions.

libnfo-1.0.1

• Support was added for Darwin and MS Windows.
• Fixes and enhancements were made in the Makefile and the configure script.

libplayer-2.0.1

But where is the version 2.0.0 ? It is a good question, this one has existed only some hours. A major bug in the X11 part of the library has been fixed between 2.0.0 and 2.0.1.

• XCB is used instead of Xlib.
• VDPAU is supported with xine and MPlayer.
• Support for VAAPI and DirectFB was added in some backends.
• Improvements were made in the GStreamer and VLC backends (which are still experimental).

Full ChangeLog here.

For people with a NVidia card supported by VDPAU, you should look at the –enable-xlib-hack option provided by the configure script for a full VDPAU support under MPlayer and xine. Without this trick, only the video output with MPlayer can use VDPAU. For the developers, note that with this option you must use XInitThreads() in your application!

libvalhalla-2.0.0

• Shutdown on force-stop was made faster.
• Concurrent grabbers are now supported.
• A ChartLyrics grabber was added.
• Languages and priorities are supported with the metadata.
• Many public functions were reworked.
• Support was added for MS Windows and Darwin.

Full ChangeLog here.

So Linux 2.6.35 is barely out and has already been integrated to GeeXboX. We planned to stick on previous kernel but this one really has some major improvements. It came with many changes over ARM architecture and allowed us to get rid of an incredible number of patches for OMAP3 boards. Also it now supports upcoming OMAP4 boards which soon will be supported by GeeXboX too.

Last but not least, there was a major improvement over x86 Intel DRM drivers that now supports H.264 hardware video decoding for newest G45 GPUs. As a result, we also update our VA-API framework and enabled it within GStreamer and VLC players, providing hardware video decoding capabilities.

As for embedded space, one may also notice the introduction of DirectFB, an accelerated framebuffer interface that allow us to provide non-X support for some devices. Enna still has to be updated to take profit of that but this will open our media center to a bunch more devices.

Last week the opkg-based packaging system, which had been in the works for some time, was finally merged in the GeeXboX mainline repository. This is a massive change for our build system, which is now able to create opkg packages of all its components.

What does this mean for end users? You will soon be able to install extra components and applications on your running GeeXboX system, like you do in a regular Linux distribution. This change will also make it easier to try some new features (such as the VDR integration) which had been available for a while but were never part of a GeeXboX release. Also, a new generator tool is planned, which will eventually allow you to build your custom GeeXboX image by choosing which features and packages to integrate. Finally, work is underway to integrate a Kconfig-based configuration interface in GeeXboX, with the goal of making the configuration and customization of the distribution easier and more flexible. Stay tuned!

Good news everyone ! The VideoLAN media player just has been released in v1.1.1 and has been integrated into mainstream GeeXboX development tree. This done, the 4 major media players (MPlayer, xine, GStreamer and now VLC) now are part of our distribution.

Thanks to libplayer and its wrappers, Enna is capable of driving any of these 4. In a short while, you’ll be able to select your favorite media player to be used within Enna. MPlayer used to be our default player for years now but thanks to its impressive DVB and streaming support, there are high chances than VLC take its place anytime soon.

Our new goal with GeeXboX is to get closer and closer to embedded systems and for that we’re currently reworking a lot of stuff to really feature a new-generation of cross-compilation framework. In a short amount of time, it’ll get very easy to generate a really customized embedded system by selecting various components as to build a fully customized distribution. In this purpose, QT has just landed in GeeXboX repository.

How QT/cute is that, huh ? Don’t get me wrong here, we’re still featuring Enna and it’s still relying on EFL, there’s no plan to change that. However, many people might be interested in developing QT-based applications and it is now possible. QT in GeeXboX is now in version 4.7.0-beta1 and features QML, the new scripting language one can use to easily create applications and I really have to say it works quite well. Current version runs through X11 only (though we may consider QWS support for very embedded systems using DirectFB) and uses OpenGL(|ES) when available. The OpenVG support is expected to come in the following weeks too.

We’ve been working for quite a few time on it and it was expected for even much longer but the GeeXboX project now has a brand new website. The whole thing is much more “Web 2.0″-like (if it still means anything …) and will provide you much more interaction with the development team.

We expect to be able to use it as a blog engine and keep you posted of every significant change and steps in the project’s lifetime. In the mean time, you’ll also be able to comment and reply to our posts and share news through various social networks.

Hope you’ll all enjoy this new website