Introduction

I am pleased to announce that a new yocto based image (v0.0.3) with my newest XBMC for iMX6 is now available.
This is a Yocto image based upon the dora version (V1.5).
This image takes advantage of the great work from freescale community while adding my own layer for most XBMC related stuff.
Today this release is available for the following devices :

• Wandboard Dual and Quad
• Utilite : I have a pro model but it may work on other variants (untested for now)

What’s in it

Basically, this image packages XBMC Gotham Alpha 9 with :

• iMX6 hw accelerated decoding (VPU) for most standard formats
• iMX CEC support (for utilite only as wandboards are not properly wired)
• WIFI configuration thanks to network manager addon
• Support for HDMI/SPDIF/Analog sound outputs (including passthrough for HDMI and SPDIF)
• SMB/NFS/uPNP network shares and other standard XBMC features

It is a ARMHF build with 3.0.35_4.1.0 kernel.

Compared to my previous images, it tries to provide better support for developers :

• Native compilation (gcc and standard dev libraries already installed)
• Cross compilation (Full SDK provided)
• Straightforward way to fully rebuild the yocto distro

It also solves some bugs found in the previous images :

• The transiant black screens are gone
• The Jump backward and Fast Backward Fast Forward are now OK
• Many videos are now perfectly smooth and no frame drop occurs (except when the GUI is being opened)
• Some bugs related to the main XBMC Gotham alpha are fixed in this updated alpha 9 version

Resources

The following sdcard images are available :

• Wandboard Quad (md5sum f913b2d586e96f8ddaa0d1014720abba)
• Wandboard Dual (md5sum cc39390ee87de8b8ef806604a79c410a)
• utilite (md5sum 6a3dae479cccedeae63d692f32cdaba2) (Was updated on 11/20 to solve boot issue some users were faced with)

You can also download :

• the wandoard Quad RFS alone (md5sum 6494d166591044beba3b27d4d6e889b6)
• the SDK for x86_64 linux host (md5sum c6ec065ba02add6005f8f4b82b5aa0a9)

Installation

The provided images target 2GiB sdcards.

• Download the relevant image for you device
• Extract it by using the xz utility :

xz -dv image_name.bin.xz

• Burn it on a sdcard by using
  • Whether win32 disk imager on Windows
  • whether the dd command on linux :

dd if=image_name.bin of=/dev/sdx bs=4M

With /dev/sdx being the sdcard device (for instance /dev/sdd)

Optionally, you can use gparted to resize the second partition/FS and benefit from all the available space on your card.

Note that installation on internal SSD for utilite pro is perfectly doable. I will publish the way to do it when the recovery tool from Compulab will be available.

How to use

At startup, XBMC is automatically launched, just have fun…
Be aware that :

• login is root and password is empty
• You have a shell on the serial line interface (115200n8)
• A ssh/scp server is up and running
• Your wired Ethernet will be configured by DHCP and you can setup wifi thanks to the XBMC nm addon

Known issues

• Sound saturation still occurs on analog output : Refer to this ticket
• HDMI passthrough for HD audio is not yet validated
• live TV support is being worked on but not yet available

Moreover, the Smart packages updater has a few issues in this release :
If the update command

smart update

does not work in spite of working internet connection, then, issue the following commands :

rm -rf /var/lib/smart/
smart channel --add wolf_repo type=rpm-md baseurl=http://www.stephan-rafin.net/rpmhf2

For obscure reasons, smart is fooled in thinking that some basics packages are not installed (while they are ) and fails when it tries to reinstall them…
As a workaround, when you install a package, use the stepped option :

smart install --stepped your_package

and refuse installation of already installed packages…

Bugs Report

This image is still work in progress.
If you experience instabilities, crashes or bugs, please report them to me without being too rude 😉
Known bugs are tracked here
Please when you report a bug :

• Try to be as precise as possible regarding the context.
• When it occurs, try to download the 2 files :
  • /tmp/temp/xbmc.log
  • /var/log/messages
• Try to reproduce it

For now, report these bugs on this blog, then we will move to a forum thread may it be the XBMC one or another one if required.
I will create tickets in trac by myself as I have disabled the ability to create tickets for anonymous because of spams.

If you need to send files, I will give you a direct link to upload on my server by mail.
In case I ask you to create a core dump dump here is the way to do it :

• Stop XBMC
• login on the board and issue the commands :

echo "/tmp/core.%e.%p" > /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
ulimit -c unlimited
/imx6/xbmc/lib/xbmc/xbmc.bin &

Then if XBMC crashes, a file core.* will be created in /tmp folder

Rebuild your own distro

Just issue the following commands on a Linux host to rebuild from scratch the whole distro :

#Install repo
mkdir ~/bin
curl http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

#Create BSP folder
PATH=${PATH}:~/bin
mkdir xbmc-bsp
cd xbmc-bsp

#Download layers
repo init -u https://github.com/wolfgar/fsl-community-bsp-platform -b dora
repo sync

#Initialize build environement
#Valid MACHINE values are wandboard-quad wandboard-dual and utilite
TEMPLATECONF=`pwd`/sources/meta-stef/conf MACHINE=wandboard-quad source setup-environment build

#Let's build the whole thing
bitbake xbmc-image

At the end you will find the image in build/tmp/deploy/images/$MACHINE folder.

Conclusion

That’s all for now, I will focus on liveTV (including hw deinterlacing) and I will investigate the analog sound output issue during the next days.
If you design a iMX6 board/device (Dual ultra or Quad) and would like that I add support to it, please mail me.
At last, if you appreciate my work and want to encourage it, you can consider to click the following button.