[Meego-tv] about qtmediahub on MeeGo(Mer)

[Dominig ar Foll (Intel OTC)]

Le 12/03/2012 10:31, Hui Zhang a écrit :
>  
>    Now we are working on a project called 'TVOS' and is based on
> MeeGo(Mer). 
Dominig: Nice to hear that you have a TV project. I do not know the
detail of compatibility between Mer and MeeGo but I expect that it's
very high;-) On my side we still working on improvement on MeeGo TV 1.2
as well as preparing for a move to Tizen at a later time.
> At first we found from MeeGo'repo that XBCM is MeeGo TV's UX. 
Dominig:
That is correct as our 'customers' are all rewriting their own UI we
ship with xbmc, so people can test with a good UI out of the box the TV
features (mostly UMMS and TV Browser). I have been told that some
projects have kept xbmc as their base for the UI but I have not seen any
product out yet which has followed that model up to production. I have
seen product with UI using the following frameworks HTML, QT, SDL and
directly OpenGL. They all work.
XBMC port to MeeGo have been done by Brendan who is a student in his
final year at Kent universtity in the UK. He normally checks this
mailing list but you can also contact him via his blog.
http://www.madeo.co.uk/ He is very responsive on the page "Buy me a
beer" :-) http://www.madeo.co.uk/?page_id=2
> We tested XBMC on our board but it performs badly since our board has
> not 3D hardware. 
Dominig: What type of hardware are you using ? xbmc requirement on
hardware is quite low if you select a simple skin. Have you checked the
Open GL ES version of XBMC ? I know that Brendan has done some tests but
fo not have the final results (not needed yet with the SoC that I use).
In MeeGo TV project we use the Intel CExxx. Reference platform can be
obtain with a simple credit card purchase from CoCom.
http://shop.cc-e.eu/Ce4100
Once that you are a register user, you have access not only to the Open
Source code but also to the restricted code. Might be a good idea to
check where you are against a know good implementation.
> So we focuse our eyes to qtmediahub.
Dominig: QT Media Hub is a Nokia project. It's a nice technology demo
but not as full featured as xbmc. As the project is still active, you
need to load the latest code to see if it does what you want.
http://gitorious.org/qtmediahub
I would not expect QT Media Hub to be less resource hungry than xbmc but
I might be wrong. I doubt that it will fly without 3D support but I am
very interrested by your finding. Please share in this list.
>  
>   Is qtmediahub suitable for our project? Our project is targeted on
> smart-TVs and STBs.
Dominig: Difficult to tell you what is suitable or not as I do not know
your project details but I can five you the following general advises :

 - xbmc is feature rich but has no live TV support (it can be added but
remains to be done). xbmc is an integrated framework which requires some
time to understand and dominate. It has been developed for fairly
powerful hardware whith little consideration for small CPU (but the
small of today are often faster than the best of yesterday). Open Elec
http://openelec.tv/ does a nice compact integration but still on PCs.

 - qtmedia hub was developed by Nokia as a technology demonstrator for
QT and QML. The project is driven by Nokia engineers and even if the
project is fully open, there is no real open community to provide you
plug in (up to you to decide if you need them). QT and QML is neither
light neither heavy as technology but without 3D rendering, I would not
expect to get a great result. QT can be run on a Direct FB backend but I
would be surprised if that would run nicely QT Media Hub which is a
fairly sophisticated application.

 - Enna http://enna.geexbox.org/ is an alternative. It a simple Media
Centre like xbmc and QT Media Hub. It's written on EFL is lighter than
any other UI framework what could fit your need. Enna project is far
less active than xbmc. EFL also has a port for DirectFB and Wayland
Backend (like QT5) what may enable you to run without X11 (depending on
other application that you want). Brendan did a test port quite a while
ago for MeeGo. http://www.madeo.co.uk/?p=687

 - HTML5. There is no 'ready made' media centre but as most Smart TV
tend to use HTML for the UI, you may want to consider that option. The
browser that we have released can do a lot. http://wiki.meego.com/TV_Browser

You also need to decide how you will support live TV. I am sure that
UMMS will run on your hardware but you may have to modify the pipeline
to fully benefit from the HW acceleration available on your CPU.

In an other domain we also released recently OBS Light, a tool kit for
OBS based platform development which might be useful for you.
http://wiki.meego.com/OBS_Light

If you have more question, please post on this list.

-- Dominig