Best choice for XBMC on MK808B?

[nola mike]

Been reading through the forums here, and getting a bit confused. I'm running a mythtv backend on a separate machine and would like to use XBMC to play DVR'd tv shows as well as live tv. Obviously I'd prefer 1080p, but not at the price of stability or stutter. Quite honestly, I have plenty of tabs/phones/computers that I mess around with. I was hoping this would work out of the box without hours of my time involved.

Using stock everything, and the vanilla frodo xbmc, I get stutter. Looks like this is pretty standard due to lack of HW acceleration. I'm having a hard time finding out what information out there is most up to date. I'd like the simplest method of getting good playback without breaking anything (don't know if the mythtv plugin is one of the ones broken with some ROMS).

1. So do I change my xbmc version? (if so, which? are the official pre-releases adequate yet?) and/or,
2. Do I need to flash a new ROM? If so, which would be best for my stated goals?
3. Do I need to use a separate player for all of my options, and if so, will it be able to deal with the live tv?

[joe9003]

This http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=168268 plus this http://www.xbmchub.com/blog/2012/04/...tion-for-xbmc/

[nola mike]

Thanks for that, though not sure what the purpose of the second link is?
Tried installing both the alpha 1 and 6 versions; neither made a significant difference. Installed the advancedsettings.xml file, which seemed to help somewhat, but definitely still not great, especially live tv. Hitting "o" while watching live tv showed me a frame rate of 10-15fps. Is there any way to check that hardware acceleration is working? Maybe monitor the GPU use somehow?

Next step I guess is to try flashing a rom with some overclocking.
1) Which would be the best/most stable 720p rom?
2) Looks like the flash methods are windows only? I'm on linux/ubuntu, is there a way to install that way? Saw one reference to using CWM, which looks like it can be installed via linux, but then it doesn't appear that most of the roms would be installable using CWM?

EDIT: May have spoken too soon. Reinstalled stock frodo, and am still getting the same fps as above. So maybe my hardware acceleration isn't working?

[joe9003]

Re: Best choice for XBMC on MK808B?

You need the 1.7c Rom for the hw to work in that xbmc the second link sets up fusion on xbmc for access to many many add-ons.

Sent from my HTC One S using Tapatalk 2

[joe9003]

Re: Best choice for XBMC on MK808B?

Oh and I use 2dark4u 720 kernel.

Sent from my HTC One S using Tapatalk 2

[mike77]

Finless 1.7c and 2dark4u kernels are for mk808, not for mk808b.

[joe9003]

Re: Best choice for XBMC on MK808B?

It's just what I use , but 1.7 is important as it has stagefright working 4.2 dose not.

Sent from my HTC One S using Tapatalk 2

[nola mike]

so been reading some more. looks like the 808b doesnt have an oc kernel available that won't break wifi? like i said, i can't tell if hw acceleration is woorking or not. certainly the playback i'm getting won't cut it. very disappointing. oh, just to be clear: hw acceleration should be automatically enabled, right? no buried option somewhere in xbmc?

[big10p]

There's always the XAF build of XBMC that uses an external, hardware accelerated player. I use it with MX Player (set to use HW not HW+) and it works good for me. I don't know about it working with your DVR stuff and live TV, though.

[Samuelsan]

In XBMC there's an option to enable HW decoding. In Settings - Video - Playback you can select the option Libstagefright. By enabling this option HW decoding should be activated (XBMC nightly 7-august-2013).

I'm also struggling to get the full XBMC experience on my MK808B. I don't like the XAF build with MXplayer, just want full XBMC. Last week I received an MiniX Neo X5 (also with Rockchip RK3066) and I managed to play 1080p movies fluent from my network (stock rom and XBMC 7-august-2013).

On my MK808B I tried various setups. At first the stock rom, later on Finless 2.1 and the last one i installed was the MINIX Hybrid. With none of these setups the 1080p movie from my NAS played fluently using XBMC nightly 7-august-2013. The best results where with the MiniX hybride firmware

Based on earlier replies I will try the Finless 1.7c ROM later this week, maybe this fixes the problem. But I think many owners of the MK808B will read this topic, perhaps they can share the optimal setup with us.

[ididmytime]

Seriously, all these questions have been answered here.

If you're struggling to play video over network, chances are it's due to the poor Wifi these devices get. Depending on how you stream, it may not using a cache so is streaming without a buffer.

Always test with local media first. If it is network related buy an ethernet adaptor, or buy a decent Wifi dongle and add the drivers, at that point, you might as well use the 2dark4u kernel on your mk808b.

H/W is also supported for 4.2 roms, Finless 1.7c doesn't exist for the B version, so will need manually patching.

[joe9003]

Seriously, all these questions have been answered here.

If you're struggling to play video over network, chances are it's due to the poor Wifi these devices get. Depending on how you stream, it may not using a cache so is streaming without a buffer.

Always test with local media first. If it is network related buy an ethernet adaptor, or buy a decent Wifi dongle and add the drivers, at that point, you might as well use the 2dark4u kernel on your mk808b.

H/W is also supported for 4.2 roms, Finless 1.7c doesn't exist for the B version, so will need manually patching.

I did read some were 2.1 did not support the new libstagefright please correct me if im wrong.

[ididmytime]

I did read some were 2.1 did not support the new libstagefright please correct me if im wrong.

Not adding/making it support it would be detrimental to the performance of these devices. The only issue with 4.2.2 and XBMC is it's impossible to use the stock player with 1080p content due to the GPU needing to be overclocked.

All new builds of XBMC has Rockchip support for GPU decoding, the problem is however, they are all based on Pre-Alpha XBMC 13. Due to this, the Feb test build is still the best one to use until an official release is made.

[94SupraTT]

Is there a ROM that I can run XBMC on my MK802II?