XBMC for Android: External Player for HW Acceleration
XBMC for Android had been frequently tested on mini Android PCs such as the MK802 III or MK808. However, the software itself had yet to incorporate hardware acceleration and would lag and skip while playing 720p and up videos. Taehyun Kim, one of the DicePlayer developers, developed a patch to allow XBMC to call a External Player on Android. By doing that we can replace the internal player of XBMC with Dice Player or MX Player.
Installation Instructions for XBMC – External Player
- Go to http://www.mdrjr.net/odroid/xbmc/ and download the files (matching the ext player of choice)
- Transfer the two files over to your device
- Install XBMC.APK through a file manager
- Run XBMC and exit
- If XBMC fails to start, check if its on the list specified here.
It has to be a NEON device. If your device falls under the “Tegra 2” category, sorry, you are out of luck. - Return to the file manager and navigate to Android/org.xbmc.xbmc/files/userdata and copy PlayerCoreFactory.XML there.
The external player implementation in XBMC-Android worked on my SGS3 and Nexus 7, but failed on my Optimus 2X as it uses a Tegra 2 chip. This is in reference to the check specified in step 5 above since my Optimus 2x uses a Tegra 2 chipset. Apparently Tegra 2 devices uses a non-standard video implementation and hence, breaks alot of core functionality in XBMC. If you were wondering about the mini PCs, we didn’t had a chance to try them but would likely work on the mali chipset of the UG802 / MK808 / MK808 III Android Mini PCs to allow the hardware acceleration hack with XBMC. This addresses the current biggest flaw of the XBMC for Android implementation of no h/w acceleration and while it is in essence, a dirty hack to bypass the core player with a third party app, overall I would consider it to work pretty well.
11 Replies to “XBMC for Android: External Player for HW Acceleration”
is this the latest xbmc? will you be doing or do u know of a regular build that would also build with this hack into it?
Thanks for the news,
How do you get XBMC to see the XML file though?
when i do that it shows “networ error”
i cant share the files from my computer .
Can you make a latest version with pvr in it and the hack? this version has no pvr (so its old).
Hi! Can you make one for Bsplayer?
YAY! Thank you very much!
Nothing when picture starts up xbmc closes ???
Hi, Could you provide more details of your setup and when does XBMC force close? You could also try the version here: it’s a newer XBMC setup. Force closing of XBMC (older versions) happens for 4.2 Jelly Bean.
Will this also work with files shared through Samba? All my video’s are on my NAS and I don’t seem to be able to play them with XBMC + Diceplayer. Using only Diceplayer + the samba share in there works fine.
You would have to use CIFS Manager to mount the share in Android for it to playable on the external player through XBMC.
Ok, thanks. That’s not really a possibility for most users with shared libraries (MySQL) or users who let XBMC manage the Samba connections.
I’ll just hang around, see if at some point the HW decoding will be build into XBMC…