Developing XBMC for Linux

Team-XBMC have ported the XBMC Media Center software to Linux in 2007.

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.

What is XBMC and why was it ported to Linux?
For developers who do not know this, XBMC Media Center (formerly named "XBox Media Center", not to be confused with Microsoft's Windows Media Center Extender for the Xbox) is an award-winning free and open source media player, originally designed to run on the Xbox game-console. The GPL/LGPL licensed source code basically consist of a GUI framework that has been written from scratch by Team-XBMC, this GUI acts as a front-end control interface for several audio/video players designed for specific purposes (and those are loaded when needed as DLLs), the GUI is also the user interface to all of XBMC multimedia handling functions such as databases and sorting, etc.. The XBMC Project, (who's members maintain XBMC source code), is a non-profit open source hobby project that is developed by volunteers in their spare-time without any monetary gain. The team of developers working on XBMC have always encouraged anyone to submit their own source code patches for new features or functions, improve on existing ones, or fix bugs.

= 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.

Where do I start on Linux?
The recommended Linux development platform is currently 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop (for x86). The code can be obtained by cloning the xbmc git repository hosted on Github. First use your package manager to install git on your system and then execute the following command to clone your own repository:

After the clone has completed, follow the compilation/development guide in the new repository (README.linux) 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.

Alternatively, you can download a finished VMware Virtual Machine (VM) and run that in the free VMware Player (or use in VMware Workstation, or VMware Server), this is a little bit old now but can still be useful to those of you that are absolutely new to developing on Linux. The VM available for download below is based on Ubuntu Desktop (32-bit for x86), and all the prerequisite software is installed (including KDevelop). Performance is not great using this, as there is no 3D hardware acceleration support under a virtual machine, however it should work good enough to get a lot of development tasks done without you having to bother with install of Ubuntu Desktop yourself. Nice is also that you can install/run VMware Player 2.0 and later under Linux as well as Microsoft Windows (including Windows Vista), 32-bit and 64-bit operating-system. The free VMware Player 2.0 and later also enables you to share data seamlessly between the virtual machine and host computer, and also allows you to directly access USB 2.0 devices from within the virtual machine. (Experimental support for 2-way Virtual SMP to assign more than a single CPU to a virtual machine is also available for testing purposes).


 * Download: VMware Virtual Machine (VM) with Ubuntu Desktop 7.04 and KDevelop (userid/password is: xbmc/xbmc).
 * Besides from KDevelop, additional development tools included are Subcommander, Doxygen, Sysprof, and PowerTop.
 * Note! In order for the PowerTop tool to actually show data, a new kernel needs to be built by yourself.
 * Our thanks goes out to tssgery for creating and hosting this first VM for the XBMC Linux port development effort.

Hardware requirements

 * x86-based computer. No other special hardware is required for development, as developers can compile using the "make sdl_2d option" (see README.linux). However for end-users the recommended minimum requirement is a 3D GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) that at least supports Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0 (that features 24bpp or 32bpp for 3D hardware-acceleration support, which the XBMC GUI needs to run smoothly at an acceptable frame-rate). Graphic adapters that support DirectX version 9.0c or later usually meet all of those mentioned requirements, (Team-XBMC recommends NVIDIA GeForce 6150 or later as NVIDIA is currently the manufacturer that offers good device-drivers for Linux (and NVIDIA GeForce 6150 or later supports OpenGL 2.0).

Can non-Linux developers also help?
XBMC can also be compiled for many other operating systems, and you can read more information about that here.

Why is OpenGL 2.0 needed for XBMC?
OpenGL 2.0 is not really the current minimum requirement to run XBMC for Linux, as in reality XBMC will today run with only OpenGL 1.3 + GLSL support. Everything else has fall-backs to be run in software on the CPU (which is slower than GPU hardware, though). However, in order to stay future-proof, Team-XBMC has decided that the OpenGL 2.0 is the recommended minimum requirement.


 * Currently OpenGL 2.0 hardware is only needed for:


 * Any deinterlacing that is not linear blending (which FFmpeg does in software)
 * Video video post-processing filtering (bicubic upscaling, etc.)
 * Non-power of two textures for the GUI (using NPOT saves a lot of texture memory)
 * Hardware accelerated YUV 2 RGB conversion (actually GLSL is needed for this, and a few GPU hardware implementations as low as OpenGL 1.3 does provide GLSL as an extension. OpenGL 2.0 guarantees availability of GLSL).
 * In the future OpenGL 2.0 might also be needed for:


 * More video post-processing filters to improve visual quality perception.
 * Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding (using the GPU hardware to assist with video decoding)