Weekly report 2

While I had exams last week there were some major work done with getting Ångström working as a development environment for XBMC, much thanks to the extremely helpful people over at #beagle!.

The plans for next weeks will consist mostly of reading up on already created technologies as I won’t be near my development machine.

Status

• Thanks to, amongst many, koen from #beagle I finally got the Ångström distribution up and running and compiled XBMC. Koen has provided a few patches necessary to get XBMC compilable and have added a few missing libraries to the repository.
• Narcissus image creator for Ångström have gotten a “Beagleboard GSoC 2010 XBMC build dependencies” as a development option to help others to easily create an image that can build XBMC. Its still missing some libraries which will get updated along the way.
• While I have focused on Ångström for now since more mentors use it and is more supported Ubuntu seems to be working with the latest SGX which make it a viable fallback once again!
• Branch created gsoc-2010-beagleboard

Plan

• Commit the patches needed to build XBMC on Ångström.
• Read up on already created graphical libraries like EVAS how they solve buffered font and event based rendering.
• Sketch up a proposal of buffered font.
• Finalize the event based rendering proposal.

Risks

• No development environment will make it harder to create proposals.
• The proposed event driven rendering will alter much of the internals of XBMC (more of a long term risk)
• While buffering text seems viable we generally use text quite differently hence a one fit all solution might be hard to find. Examples of uses

  • “Streaming” text in inputfields and subtitles

  • Small text labels

  • Large scrolling text which might stretch beyond a texture limit. While it may not change much with the exception of scrolling, generate the text might take a significant time and would use a lot of memory. This might introduce lagg to the GUI or just take up to much memory.