OpenBricks

The multimedia components of OpenBricks have been greatly improved to now feature up to 4 kind of MediaCenter software to turn your device into an HTPC. As a user, if you intend to build your own SetTopBox (through GeeXboX distribution flavour for example), you may now choose between Enna (EFL-based), XBMC (SDL-based), MythTV (Qt3 based) and QtMediaHub (Qt4/QML-based).

Along from Enna, which was the only supported MediaCenter so far, we just added the XBMC and MythTV, the 2 major HTPC software ever. While MythTV is still quite a bit work-in-progress so far, XBMC works like a charm, including on OMAP devices. XBMC 10.0 just has been released a few ago and was integrated within OpenBricks, offering a complete hardware video decoding support either through CrystalHD, VDPAU or VA-API frameworks. XBMC for ARM is working so far but unfortunately doesn’t yet provide any acceleration but it’s in the work.

A newcomer also has been added through the experimental QtMediaHub project. This is a proof-of-concept application from Nokia that re-uses XBMC skin engine (and Confluence theme) to create a MediaCenter fully written in the new QML language, that already features many nice things like audio/video playback, pictures browsing but also a nice Web Browser.

We’ll try to provide testing binaries and images ASAP …