Archive:Mac FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What is XBMC for OS X?

XBMC for OS X is a port of the highly functional and successful XBMC to the Apple Macintosh OS X platform. Like XBMC, XBMC for OS X is open source and licensed under the GPL.

What are the goals of XBMC for OS X?

To take the power and functionality of XBMC and get it completely ported to the OS X platform. To offer XBMC in a package that runs on (more) modern hardware that is more "accessible" to the non-expert user. We would like for people to be able to experience XBMC in just minutes - and be as simple as downloading and installing any other Macintosh application. Also, as many long time XBMC users know, the legacy XBox platform simply does not have the horsepower to play HD content. XBMC for OS X hopes that by targeting an OS that's underlying hardware is refreshed on a pretty regular basis will allow the project to continue to be able to play media as it gets increasingly higher definition and higher bit rate.

What are the longterm goals of XBMC for OS X?

To be the best media center for the Mac, offer tighter integration with OS X platform, and to give users the best of what XBMC and OS X offer. Eventually, we would like XBMC for OS X to behave and feel like a completely native Mac application.

What is the relationship with XBMC and XBMC on Linux

The XBMC, XBMC for Linux and the XBMC for OS X teams all have a very good relationship and similar goals, however, it is important to point out the the XBMC for OS X does not speak for the XBMC and/or XBMC for Linux teams. XBMC for OS X is a direct port of XBMC for Linux, and at this point strives to replicate most of XBMC's capabilities on OS X. The OS X platform is much closer to Linux than the XBox or Windows platforms, so OS X code is completely based off of the Linux port code base. The OS X code is checked into the official XBMC source code repository under the Linux branch.

Why OS X, why not just put your energy into the Linux branch?

The XBMC for OS X team are all Linux users and Linux fans, however, the founding team has friends and family members that are intimidated by Linux, or already happy Mac users that are not interested in building a separate box just for media playing purposes. Additionally, the team believes that there is an advantage in that there are limited hardware combinations with the Mac platform. With less combinations of hardware to support we can spend our time making sure the limited number of combinations that are available work very well. It's also no secret that the team (and many in the community) view the Mac Mini as an especially attractive HTPC option in terms of appearance, size/heat/noise, functionality and price (and let's not forget built-in IR, Bluetooth and WLAN)!

Doesn't it make more sense to chip in and get the Linux port perfect before embarking on a new platform?

We believe that both ports are very important to the future success and viability of XBMC. By adding OS X as a platform we are attracting new talent and resources to the XBMC project that might not have otherwise been interested. Today, we have had good luck with both platforms beings developed quickly in parallel - improvements made to the Linux code base often improve the OS X platform and vice versa.

Where can I find more information about XBMC for OS X?

The developer blog  : http://www.osxbmc.com
the trac site/wiki  : http://www.dn-0.com/xbmc-trac
XBMC for OS X Dev Forum  : http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?f=57
XBMC for OS X User Forum : http://forum.xbmc.org/forumdisplay.php?f=56
XBMC for OS X Dev IRC  : xbmc-osx on freenode.net

Who is working on XBMC for OS X?

http://www.osxbmc.com/about/

What platforms are supported today?

Currently, we are only supporting Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard) on Intel (x86) processors. XBMC for Mac is working quite well on all Intel Macs.

Why is a OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphic-controller the recommended minimum for XBMC?

OpenGL 2.0 is not really the current minimum requirement to run XBMC, as in reality XBMC will today run with only OpenGL 1.4 + GLSL support (everything else has fall-backs to be runned in software on the CPU, slower than GPU hardware though), however to be sure to stay future-proof Team-XBMC have 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 1.4 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)

What platforms will be supported?

Our plan is to support all current Intel Mac hardware.

Will you support PPC and/or Tiger?

It's unlikely that we will ever support PPC. Many people think that it is as simple as "checking PPC" in XCode, it is not. Additionally, as stated above one of the goals of XBMC for OS X is to support HD playback on most hardware - this is just not likely on legacy Mac PPC hardware. Tiger support is not a near term goal, but it is a possibility in the future. It's obviously quite possible to get XBMC for OS X to work on Tiger, but the team has determined that it is also non-trivial. As we get closer to a 1.0 release we will poll the community to see how much demand there is for Tiger support.

What works today?

This is an alpha release, we will not consider this project "production" quality until 1.0. It is still very early days. While we are happy with our progress, and the core XBMC for OS X team has switched over to using it as our primary media center, the project is far from stable and complete. Unless you are an active tester or developer we do not recommend you run this as your primary media center...yet.

Audio  : Playing, Visualizations (MProject), MP3, OGG, AAC, FLAC
Video  : Playing, Full-screen, most video formats
Photos  : Viewing, browsing, slideshows, RAW support
Metadata  : IMDB, Allmusic, etc scraping working
Library mode  : Working but can be flaky
Connectivity  : Local disk, FTP, VFS (SMB)
Extensibility : Python (as well as XBMC on Linux Python works currently...read: needs work)

What doesn't work today?

• Suboptimal remote control support
  
• Media buffering/caching is less than perfect
  

Why shouldn't I use this yet?

If any of the things in the "What doesn't work today" category are critical to you, ie Apple remote control support. Also, it's still pretty unreliable, as a rule once you get a movie started and it's playing correctly it will continue to play correctly all the way to the end. However, the average user would probably experience at least a couple of crashes a day with regular use. That being said we have not heard of anyone having a catastrophic failure, no one has lost data, damaged their receiver or anything like that. The average user will just have to use a wireless keyboard and restart ever so often.

What is on the roadmap (features that you are likely or certain you will support)?

We are certain that we will support all the features called out in the not working section. Beyond that we have a high degree of confidence that we will also eventually support the following :

• The majority of HD content on a 2GHZ C2D Mac mini. Currently the mini can play 720p content flawlessly. We would like to get the code tuned to the point where it can play 1080p content flawlessly. Currently, XBMC for OS X (and many other players) often only takes advantage of one of the cores so we think it's theoretically possible to get there, somehow, someway. Worst case scenario we eventually wait for the hardware to get there.
  
• MAME integration.
  
• Check for update/auto update functionality, perhaps through Sparkle.
  
• Notifications via Growl.
  
• Some lightweight integration with common Mac software like iTune / iPhoto.
  

How will you support remote controls?

Obviously you can use a wireless keyboard to control XBMC for OS X (see What are the keys? bullet below). Additionally, you can use a remote control with XBMC for OS X by using the excellent product Remote Buddy by using it to map your remote's buttons to the keys. Our current remote control "road map" is as follows :

1. Support the Apple remote.
Get support for the Apple remote so it works right out of the box. The main advantage of this Apple remote is that it comes free with just about every Mac. The downside The apple remote's primary weakness is that it only has 6 buttons, although the Mac has the ability to differentiate a pressed button from a held button giving the user effectively 12 buttons.

2. Support Universal IR remotes.
We are evaluating a few different ideas of how to allow a universal IR remote control more than 6 discrete features by using macros or something similar. With the ultimate goal of the user to be able to download to load up a Logitech Harmony or URC device profile for XBMC for OS X and the user has all (or more than) the discrete buttons and functionality that the original XBMC for XBox has.

We have developed a Mac IR support proposal that covers 1 and 2 here: Mac IR Support Proposal

3. Support Bluetooth remotes.
This would allow a host of different devices to control XBMC for OS X, the PS3 remote, your iphone, etc. Also, given that the PS3 uses Bluetooth, it is possible we will see BT functionality in more Universal Remotes going forward.

4. XBox controllers (Orig. XBox USB, Wired 360 and Wireless 360 controller).
For the true XBMC experience! Becomes even more important once we get MAME integration going.

What are the keys, how do I use this thing?

You can enable the mouse through the settings, but typically it's better to use the keyboard. The default keys are as follows :

<arrow keys> - navigate
<page up and down> - scroll up and down
<enter> - select 
<esc> - previous menu  
<backspace> - go up back (or up) a directory
<space> -  pause
<period> - Skip Next
<comma> - Skip Previous
<tab> - Minimize Video
<backslash> - Full Screen Toggle
<printscreen> = Screen Shot
<minus> - Volume Down
<plus> - Volume Up
<0 - 9> - 0 through 9

p - Play
f - Fast Forward
c - Context menu
r - Rewind
x - Stop
m - Player controls
s - Shutdown menu
i - Info
q - Queue
z - Change aspect ratio

Will this run on AppleTV?

We believe that it is probably technically possible to get XBMC for OS X to run on Apple TV hardware. The processor would be underpowered for most HD content, and it would probably perform very closely to the original XBox hardware (unless someone figured out how to utilize the onboard h.264 hardware). While it seems to be technically possible, this team has no plans to support XBMC for OS X on Apple TV. We are big fans of both Apple and their technology, so we are not willing to engage in anything that Apple could consider "hacking" or encouraging people to hack. Our official recommendation is you want something like Apple TV, either buy an Apple TV, or spend the extra $200 and get a Mac Mini and be able to do both!

Will there be iTunes/iTunes Store/iPod integration?

This is a high priority for us, and while we have ideas we do not have a concrete approach yet. We'd love for users to be able to buy a movie or a song off of iTunes and be able to play it through the same interface they use with the rest of their content. Again, any implementation we would consider would have to be "Apple Friendly".

Why does the audio sound like static?

You're trying to play digital encoded audio to a system incapable of decoding it. In the Audio Hardware Settings change the mode to Analog.

Where can I get help

User Forum

As always please search the forums first, and keep in mind we are not officially recommending this to be used by anyone that isn't willing to be a bleeding edge alpha/beta tester.

How do I report bugs?

Report bugs through XBMC for OS X trac tickets.

Again please search to make sure your bug has not already been entered.

How do I suggest features?

User Forum

(Did we mention we like it if people search first before suggesting or asking?)

How can I help?

If you are an end user, hit the Donate button! That helps us pay for bandwidth, different Macs and remote controls to test, and of course beer.

If you are a developer, tester, company or other project and would like to chip in and help somehow send an email to cullman+osxbmc at google's webmail.