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RiOT Project Idea : Turn it into a Media Center with NAS features

GregC

Hi all,

 

I ordered a Riot board and want to do a Media Center (XBMC or PlexMedia) with some NAS features to share some photos with my family via internet.

I guess the Riot thanks to its i.MX6 (ARM Cortex-A9 running up to 1GHz) and its fast 1GB DDR3 @800MHz should be able to handle it, simply cause the Raspberry-Pi can handle it with a slower processor and less/slower memory.

I reviewed your documents and found some interesting informations how to set-up the board, but nothing about those kind of "application usages"

 

My Questions for you are:

1. Do you think the RiOT board can handle this ?

2. Did you already succeeded to run such an application on your board (even with partial features) ?

3. Do you have some simple guide/tutorial to recommend to make it work on my board ?

 

I am not a Linux expert so it could be nice if you could provide me simple instructions to "impress" my kids ;D


Thanks in advance for your help

Greg

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  • I have no doubts that the RIoTboard is technically capable, however, I just tried xbmc on the stock Linux (Ubuntu) with

     

    apt-get install xbmc

     

    It installs but won't run, it comes up with an error that it requires hardware accelerated OpenGL and that the correct graphics driver needs to be installed.

  • in reply to bwelsby

    from what I've read, you need both the vivante driver shim in the kernel and some userspace binary-only shared libs. Haven't looked in much detail as I'm not particularly interested myself.

    I know that the i.MX6 is quite capable of doing video decode at a hardware level though.

     

    These:

    XBMC development for i.MX6 : A new organization | Stephan's blog

    https://github.com/xbmc-imx6/xbmc

    https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv

    Etna viv - Wandboard Wiki

    SolidRun Community • View topic - Help with setting up opensource vivante aka etna_viv drivers

    http://boundarydevices.com/mx6-video-acceleration-raring-debian/

     

    could be useful. 

     

    Other bits of information I've picked up along the way have been that at some point the binary bits were soft float only and that there may only be a version of them compiled for older Xorg versions as well as some issues with gstreamer 0.1 vs 1.0.  Pulling all the relevant pieces together is hampered by there seemingly not being a central place to look, you seem to need to get bits from BoundaryDevices, bits from Wandboard, bits from freescale etc. Searching the various forums and mailing lists turns up a range of information, but seemingly a lot of it is out of date.

    There are bits of a vivante DRM driver in one of Robert Nelsons github repos - one of those nasty tree of disorganised patches things if I remember, but I could never work out if it was possible to use it with the binary only shared libs or not.

     

    For anyone wondering, the vivante stuff seems fairly simple from the kernel driver perspective and as far as I can tell you don't need a nvidia-style binary kernel driver, you do however need either etna_viv or the binary shared libs to produce the command stream to send into the device.

  • in reply to Former Member

    Ok so I did a bit more digging as I thought the drivers were included with the E14 Linux download and indeed they are supposed to be.

    When you boot up you get an error because the kernel "modules" can't be found. The directory /lib/modules contents do not match the version of the kernel being loaded.   I therefore rebuilt the u-boot and kernel version embest_imx_3.0.35_4.0.0 and also installed the modules.

     

    XBMC now runs but when playing videos, no picture and sound very low.

    I can play the videos with Movie Player or Banshee Media Player and I get a good picture but sound is still low.

  • in reply to bwelsby

    Maybe you´ll have to try the xbmc version with support for imx6 freescale CPUs to get a picture.

     

    What do you mean with the sound is low? Do you mean the volume or that it´s somwhat stretched.

    Then it would have the same problem in Linux as in Android.

  • in reply to radiatortwo

    Otto Römmich wrote:

     

    Maybe you´ll have to try the xbmc version with support for imx6 freescale CPUs to get a picture.

     

    What do you mean with the sound is low? Do you mean the volume or that it´s somwhat stretched.

    Then it would have the same problem in Linux as in Android.

    Yes an imx6 XBMC may work, not tried that yet.

    The volume is very low, I can't scope the output to check properly, my scope blew up image can't afford to replace it.

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  • in reply to radiatortwo

    Otto Römmich wrote:

     

    Maybe you´ll have to try the xbmc version with support for imx6 freescale CPUs to get a picture.

     

    What do you mean with the sound is low? Do you mean the volume or that it´s somwhat stretched.

    Then it would have the same problem in Linux as in Android.

    Yes an imx6 XBMC may work, not tried that yet.

    The volume is very low, I can't scope the output to check properly, my scope blew up image can't afford to replace it.

Children
  • in reply to bwelsby

    Is that sound from the analogue output, or over HDMI ?

     

    Either way, I'm not sure it's worth wasting a lot of time on 3.0.35.  Keep in mind that this 3.0.35 kernel is likely the same as the Android one that has audio issues too.

  • in reply to Former Member

    selsinork wrote:

     

    Is that sound from the analogue output, or over HDMI ?

     

    Either way, I'm not sure it's worth wasting a lot of time on 3.0.35.  Keep in mind that this 3.0.35 kernel is likely the same as the Android one that has audio issues too.

    Analogue, my monitor doesn't have audio.

    Yes I agree, about 3.035 I was just seeing if installing the missing modules fixed anything.

    Personally I'm not really interested in running XBMC or a media center, all my TVs are networked and can access the media on my NAS storage.