XBMC for UDOO

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Intro

Udoo is a dev board which was funded by a kickstarter project.
During these last years, I am convinced that many people have though : Why the hell there is not a single modern dev board (pandaboard, beaglebone, Rpi, cubieboard…) which strives to provide some sort of real compatibility with the arduino ecosystem ?
It would be the best of two worlds : A modern a powerful system on chip and the availability of so many sketches for all and any crazy projects…
Udoo exactly solves this absurdity by coupling a freescale iMX6 and a Atmel SAM3X8E (arduino due) !
Thus, this board is obviously very attractive for DIY enthusiasts and I am very pleased to make my iMX6 XBMC work available for it.

XBMC

I have just packaged the recent u-boot 2013-10 for udoo and upgraded the 2.6.35_4.0.0 udoo kernel to 2.6.35_4.1.0 so that my last image can be available for this exciting platform.
I also added all relevant recipes in my yocto layer : The new machines are udoo-quad and udoo-dual
That being said, my previous post is fully relevant for any other topics (installation, bug reports, distro generation and so on…)

  • The udoo-quad image is available for download – md5sum 676736f4c0a139ba9ecd48ec5c7be29b
  • The udoo-dual image is available for download – md5sum 53773dd84d97bbbd25aa008ab250ddac

This is a first release which may be quite rough but it will improve over time of course…
Discussion about this image can happen in udoo forums

35 thoughts on “XBMC for UDOO”

  1. Pingback: XBMC for UDOO by Stephan Rafin | UDOO

    • Hi,

      In fact it should already be supported as I package libcec (But I have not tested as I don’t own such an adapter…)
      Please note that with a properly designed imx6 board you don’t even need a cec adapter because the chipset is already able to handle the cec signal by itself. Unfortunately, many boards, including current revision of udoo, are not correctly wired regarding CEC signal…
      Please have a look at
      http://stephan-rafin.net/blog/2013/09/30/i-mx6-cec/ for more details…
      Kind regards
      Stephan

      Reply ↓

  4. When I boot with this image the video cuts off every few seconds, starting at the bootsplash. I’ve verified the boot.scr contents from another uboot image that works and found nothing. I also tried setting the uboot hdmi config to the native resolution of my monitor instead of 1080p but it made no difference.

    Any ideas how to proceed?

    Reply ↓

    • Hmmm
      such reports are not common.
      Do you have a quad or dual udoo ?
      After this issue occurs several times, can you issue a dmesg command a post the logs on a online copy/paste site so that I can check whether there are some hints about the issue in them ?
      Also, if you have another monitor/TV, it could be interesting to test…
      Stephan

      Reply ↓

  5. Hey thx everything works fine here. Even hd movies play very smooth.
    The only problem i have is with the subtitles. When i click on the subtitle icon and than download and the menu comes it dissepeers again whitout i can check for subtitles.

    Reply ↓

      • Hrmm the plugin I need to get working is missing alot of deps. Without dpkg, apt-get, yum. Its almost impossible to get them working. Aside from “smart” what other package manager is on this img?

        Reply ↓

        • smart is the default package manager. apt-get or yum will not help you. The real underlying question is not about the package manager, it is about the custom distro and the repository which does not contain the package you wish…
          If you want to use a generic distro, you can try to rebuild xbmc and use the kernel I provide on your own (some users have been able to do this). Others also managed to use alien tool to mix a generic distro with my own…

          Best regards
          Stephan

          Reply ↓

  7. My brother suggested I might like this website. He was totally right.
    This post actually made my day. You can not imagine simply how much time
    I had spent for this info! Thanks!

    Reply ↓

  9. Hi Stephan, I have tested it for more than a week now on my udoo-dual and it behaves correctly. Sometimes videos loose the sync with the audio, but maybe the problem are my media files, i will make some tests later. The boot and Ethernet are ok, and the option to re-size the picture image to avoid over-scan is really appreciated. The only 2 majors problems I have found so far is that i cannot install any software on the device using the software tab and that the weather tab does not show anything. When I click on “install” nothing happens. I don’t know if there is some configuration issue but i didn’t find the solution so far.

    Also, I am a software developer myself, is there any i can do to help in the develop of this port?
    Regards,

    Reply ↓

  10. Hello everyone.
    First to say I’m delighted with that wonderful microcontroller board is awesome.
    I am very interested in putting xbmc with NAS software and server owncloud. In this way we can share files with my friends.

    I’ve been testing what it says on the blog stephan (http://stephan-rafin.net/blog/2013/12/06/xbmc-for-udoo/) but I can not install the OwnCloud and telling me that I need dependencies.
    I have also tried installing the Linux Linaro, but then I do not get install XBMC because I also missing dependencies.

    Some kind soul could help me in the process.

    Thank you very much friends.

    Reply ↓

  11. Hi Stephan,
    Do you know if USB audio output works on XBMC UDOO ?
    (like Volumio). Because I want to plug a USB DAC on it.Thx

    Bonjour Stéphan
    Pourriez vous m’indiquer si la sortie audio USB fonctionne avec XBMC. Pour savoir si je peux brancher un DAC USB dessus et ainsi l’utiliser comme serveur audiophile/video.
    Merci d’avance.

    Reply ↓

      • Hi Fabien
        First flac audio is supported by xbmc whatever the physical audio output is…
        Then for your specific USB audio you may need to compile an additional module or to rebuild the kernel to add support for it
        What is exactly the device you would like to use ? (and what is your board?)
        Regards
        Stephan

        Reply ↓

  12. Hi Stephan. Thank you for all your amazing work! I managed to compile and install your yocto xbmc image onto my udoo quad and its working well…

    Just one question:
    Does anyone know the status on CEC control being made available in the udoo kernel?…because i assume this is all Stephan needs to get the pulse eight cec adapter software to work properly in xbmc?(without buying the pulse eight adapter hardware of course)

    Reply ↓

  13. Hi Stephan.

    Sorry, stupid question: when I run the setup environment script (MACHINE=udoo-quad TEMPLATECONF=`pwd`/sources/meta-stef/conf source setup-environment build-$(date +%F)) it tells me that it’s going to build for a udoo-quad (“Configuring for udoo-quad”, “MACHINE=udoo-quad”) but then the bitbake tells me otherwise: “MACHINE = “wandboard-quad””.

    I ran the build anyway and it completed without issue. The resulting built images are in a “wandboard-quad” directory with “wandboard-quad” names. Is this just a labling issue and everything is actually for the Udoo or am I stuffing up somewhere?

    You’ve done some awesome work here dude. Thank you so much for your efforts.

    Cheers.
    Shaun.

    Reply ↓

  14. Hi Shaun

    I noticed the same thing when building the yocto image…the directory would be labelled wandboard-quad. To change it I went into the local.conf file right before issuing the bitbake xbmc-image command and changed the MACHINE variable to udoo-quad instead of wandboard-quad.

    Then after bitbaking the image the resulting directory would be labelled udoo-quad. I dont know if this makes any difference to the way the image is built tho. It might be purely just a label and nothing more…hopefully Stephan can shed some light on that…

    Reply ↓

    • Hi Shaun,

      In fact when you issue the
      source setup-environment build
      for the first time the configuration file conf/local.conf is created.
      Following this first invocation, the configuration file will be kept and reused (so you don’t even have to set the env variables TEMPLATECONF and MACHINE, the next times you source the set-environment as the content of the configuration will be used anyway.)
      If you want to change the target, you can manually edit the configuration file or you can remove it and relaunch the full command (with env var properly set) : a new configuration file will be created.

      As you suspect, there is a lot of common stuff between the different machines (especially all packages which are built in tmp/work/cortexa9hf-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/ are just the same whatever the machine is).
      Yet there are a few differences (mainly kernel end bootloader and their dependencies)

      Best regards
      Stephan

      Reply ↓

      • Thanks Stephan.

        I did delete the build directory and re-ran the set-environment script and the result was the same. If all I need to do is edit the conf file though I can manage. 🙂

        I’ll need to spend some more time playing with Yocto so I can work out how to add things to customise the image.

        Thanks for your time.
        Shaun

        Reply ↓

  15. Hi,

    Sorry for the dummy question: how can I setup the wireless connection using the yocto xbmc distro?

    I need to setup it from shell or using the interface?

    Thanks for your help.

    Reply ↓

  16. Hi, Thank you so much for creating XBMC for udoo. The only problem I am having with XBMC is that my wifi network will not show up on the udoo. The wifi is working fine and when I run andriod, it will pick up the wifi but when running XBMC, it says there are no connections. Is there any way to fix this?

    Thanks,

    Luke

    Reply ↓

  17. Hi,
    I’m having the same problem with the wifi setup using the udoo_quad_xbmc_20131129.img
    When I use the Network Manager my wireless network doesn’t show up. Adding it manually doesn’t work either…
    Is there any other way to set it up?
    Thanks, Lorenz

    Reply ↓

  18. Can you please check the owncloud links? Do not seem to be working for me. Appreciate all the good work!

    Reply ↓

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