Xbox as cheap alternative to MVP?

[sub]

I'll PM you his email address

Looks like the MVP protocol is nothing more than a slightly modified VNC protocol, so it should be quite simple to make it all work, and if his emulator is 90% there, then I should be able to port the code to xbox, and fine tune it.

There would still need to be quite a bit of work around the video side of things. His code will just be demultiplexing the stream and sending it to the MVPs hardware encoders. You'd need to substitute this with something like libmpeg.

[Glasswalker]

From what I read though, it appears that the protocol just recieves a YUV framebuffer in raw format over tcp/ip (basic VNC protocol) and displays it via the system framebuffer (which in the MVP appears to go to the tvout).

Of course I will need to dig through his code further to confirm this.

Thanks for your help!

(what do you think about the PS3 idea? I will personally spend my entire vacation writing a ps3 client for GBPVR if someone would be gracious enough to "donate" a ps3 for development purposes... lol)

[sub]

From what I read though, it appears that the protocol just recieves a YUV framebuffer in raw format over tcp/ip (basic VNC protocol) and displays it via the system framebuffer (which in the MVP appears to go to the tvout).

This is only the menus. The video uses a proprietary streaming mechanism to pass chunks of MPEG2 data to the MVP, which is then demuxed and decoded in hardware on the MVP.

[Glasswalker]

Ahhh... damn. Yeah so libmpeg will need to do the decoding. The xbox nvidia chip should have hardware mpeg decoding capabilities, and I'm assuming xebian knows how to make use of them (considering dvd playback and things like xbmc make use of it). So it should be a simple matter of passing the mpeg that it is barfing into the onboard MVP chip into libmpeg calls with a wrapper function. (hopefully)

But once again, would need to see the code first.

[sub]

From memory, xbmc isnt based on xbox linux. Instead its a DirectX application built using a pirated copy of the Microsoft XDK.

I dont know if the xbox linux is able to tap into the hardware accelleration features of the xbox or not.

[mvallevand]

Glasswalker contacetd me and I told him I would be glad to help as much as I can. The project is feasible because mvpmc can be compiled in a linux host mode, but the entire audio and video sub system would have to be re-worked, perhaps using xbox mplayer.source.

Martin

[sub]

Thanks for the confirmation. This is pretty much what I thought.

[capone]

Unrelated but on the subject, I wonder/hope the direction they are headed in is a single unit that is a combo of xbox and a windows media pc, w/ the home-control functions they keep steering towards.

Seems like it would be an easy leap to supe-up a pc to xbox play speeds, and make the console part an app or OS you switch to for games, and exit out to the home/fmaily media part.

They would grab two markets that way (console & pvr), and bring people off the fence who don't need both (eg, I like pvr, don't need a console, but would start buying games if it came with).

[pt-1]

Could you not just use VLC to send the Stream to XBMC ?

A lot of Set Top Boxes here in Europe (Dbox and Dreambox) can just stream their TS via Lan to a Clientsoftware on XBMC.

The XBMC Mediaplayer handeles the rest

[mvallevand]

Could you not just use VLC to send the Stream to XBMC ?

A lot of Set Top Boxes here in Europe (Dbox and Dreambox) can just stream their TS via Lan to a Clientsoftware on XBMC.

The XBMC Mediaplayer handeles the rest

The mvpmc client code can connect to vlc too but that does not give access to gbpvr which is the real point of this thread.

Martin