Is geexbox dead?

[homernl82 Member]

Hello,

Geexbox is lagging behind other distributions by ages by now, despite me running nearly the latest development snapshot. There’s no kodi yet, the newest plexbmc addon.xml is requiring some editing to make it work and performance is bad. I still have a spare raspberry pi around and OSMC seems to be far ahead, version wise and most importantly OSMC an Raspberry Pi is having far better performance than geexbox on my cubox, despite the cubox having much more power. Why is that?

I am thinking about throwing out the cubox and putting a raspberry pi into my media system. Will there be any efforts to catch up with OSMC in the near future? I mean geexbox 3.1 was released November 2013, that’s ancient by now. And not sure what is changing in the development snapshots anymore. Waiting for the kodi switch for ages now. Is there any other software for the cubox?

Really regretting buying the cubox by now, when a 30€ raspberry kicks its ass with ease running OSMC. A friend having bought a cubox-i in the near past, is having even more regrets, as geexbox is running much worse on that.

Kind regards

homernl82

[Warped Rudi Moderator]

I still have a spare raspberry pi around and OSMC seems to be far ahead, version wise and most importantly OSMC an Raspberry Pi is having far better performance than geexbox on my cubox, despite the cubox having much more power.

Then use that.

A friend having bought a cubox-i in the near past, is having even more regrets, as geexbox is running much worse on that.

Again: If it is that bad, do not use it.

[homernl82 Member]

Well, I bought the Cubox for that very purpose, and it isn’t THAT bad. It works, but I set it to 720p and disabled background fanart to make the experience acceptable. I wouldn’t want to throw it away. I was just annoyed by friend’s raspberries doing a much better job at running xbmc, while I bought the special purpose hardware with much better specs for a much higher price. I’m sorry if my previous post was kind of offensive. I wasn’t quite in the right mood 😉 But compared to rapsbmc (now OSMC), geexbox went commercial far earlier by making a deal with solidrun/cubox. So I expected to get the best experience and a more active development out of it. While Geexbox was slightly ahead of raspbmc back in the day when I bought my cubox, by now things have changed a lot. So my question still holds: Are there any efforts to get the cubox/geexbox combo to beat the raspberry/osmc combo in performance as it technically should? And are there any efforts to get it to the current version of kodi, such that up to date addons can be used without problems?

Kind regards

homernl82

[Warped Rudi Moderator]

But compared to rapsbmc (now OSMC), geexbox went commercial far earlier by making a deal with solidrun/cubox. So I expected to get the best experience and a more active development out of it.

We never went “commercial”. We (currently @tomlohave and myself) do this stuff in our spare time. So we decide what we do and when. SolidRun is so kind to offer hosting services and some sample hardware. That’s it.

Are there any efforts to get the cubox/geexbox combo to beat the raspberry/osmc combo in performance as it technically should?

No. I’m not even sure if it’s possible without a major change in the support policy of the chip vendor (Marvell/Vivante). Maybe the reverse engineered Vivante driver (etnaviv) is a possible way to go. But we are talking here about a rather big effort with no guarantee for success on a platform that already reached it’s end of life. BTW, I don’t think that raspberry/geexbox is significant slower than raspberry/osmc.

And are there any efforts to get it to the current version of kodi

Not at the moment. Even though I might have a look at this when I find the time. CuBox support in XBMC is not mainlined. It was developed by former team XBMC member Gimli, Rabeeh of SolidRun and myself. I’m quite positive that it will require several days of work to integrate into Kodi. That is without any functional improvement. For the mainlined platforms (CuBox-i, Utilite, RaspberryPi, PaspberryPi2, Intel) Geexbox with Kodi 15 can be built by just selecting the appropiate configuration. But we do not yet provide images.

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