Developing XBMC for Android

Team-XBMC have ported the XBMC Media Center software to Android in 2012.

XBMC is a huge open source project and it takes loads of people working together to maintain it for all platforms, that is why Team-XBMC is always on the lookout for C/C++ programmers to volunteer in assisting us with the development of XBMC. Whether you have contributed to The XBMC Project in the past or not, please consider doing so now.

Those of you who are completely unfamiliar with XBMC can get a good overview of it on XBMC and XBMC FAQ.

Compiling XBMC

 * See: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/docs/README.android

Skill requirements and where to start
Proficiency in C/C++ programming language and, though not required, knowledge of OpenGL and/or multimedia programming is a plus, as well as prior cross-platform or porting development experience. Familiarity with the Android SDK and NDK is also a bonus.

A good understanding of JNI is highly recommended, since many operations in the Android environment require specific actions from the developers, that are not necessarily common in typical native code. These include:


 * Not being able to directly access the content of VM objects through direct native pointers. E.g. you cannot safely get a pointer to a String object's 16-bit char array to iterate over it in a loop.
 * Requiring explicit reference management when the native code wants to keep handles to VM objects between JNI calls.

Supported Development Platforms

 * Ubuntu 11 or later

The source code can be obtained by cloning the xbmc git repository hosted on Github.

To retrive the source code:
 * cd $HOME
 * git clone git://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git xbmc-android
 * cd xbmc-android
 * git submodule update --init addons/skin.touchedgit://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git xbmc-android

After obtaining the code repository, follow the compilation/development guide in the new repository to setup the required packages and so on. Team-XBMC developers opinion is that the best thing to start with is just to take a look through the source code and try to understand how it all fits together. Test things out, find what works and what does not, then try and track down why.

Software requirements

 * Compiling XBMC for Android requires at least Android NDK Revision r8e. Android NDK Revision 7 and earlier do not work properly for our cause.

Hardware requirements

 * x86-based computer. No other special hardware is required for development. For Android devices, either a virtual or hardware device can be used for development.
 * If using Mac OS X, this library from Intel is likely to be very helpful for hardware acceleration of a virtual Android environment.

Porting Libraries
The following is a list of libraries which XBMC relies upon.


 * Libraries