Xbmc in popcorn hour

[halfelite]

(01-17-2012 07:03 PM)Milhouse Wrote:  How can I have misunderstood "because the XBMC licence prevents commercial use" - I think that statement is worthy of clarification, as it appears to be patently incorrect.

As for the "general OS with general XBMC on a pre-installed for you platform" - you've heard of Microsoft Windows Media Center? How is XBMC any different? It's slow progress but there are already companies selling turnkey XBMC solutions, and as the hardware becomes more powerful and cheaper, and as XBMC/OpenELEC improves (and they both are) I think the number of companies offering such solutions will only increase.

A couple thing about this. The main issue from commercial use is the underlying system in xbmc is heavly based on ffmpeg from ffmpegs own website.

Quote:Q: Bottom line: Should I be worried about patent issues if I use FFmpeg?
A: Are you a private user working with FFmpeg for your own personal purposes? If so, there is remarkably little reason to be concerned. Are you using FFmpeg in a commercial software product? Read on to the next question...

Q: Is it perfectly alright to incorporate the whole FFmpeg core into my own commercial product?
A: You might have a problem here. There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.

So while yes xbmc is free for commercial use it comes at a price that someone might come and sue you for money or patent infringement once you start making money.

Same goes for all the open sources libraries that are used in xbmc There is a high chance they they have patent infringing code inside it.

Same goes for the scrapping engines. Do you think IMDB would sit around and let some company scrap there website instead of paying for the api, which comes at a starting price of $15,000 or something

So when you get into commercial products its not a clear cut and dry case that means cheap hardware cheap software, it costs some big bucks to legally licensing everything you will be using making sure you are not using patented code. and securing all the data mining sources you need.

[Milhouse]

Or in other words, the XBMC licence does not in any way prevent commercial use, however using open source software in a commercial product may leave you open to patent infringement unless you do your homework (or believe Micorosft). Thanks for clarifying.

[halfelite]

(01-17-2012 10:07 PM)Milhouse Wrote:  Or in other words, the XBMC licence does not in any way prevent commercial use, however using open source software in a commercial product may leave you open to patent infringement unless you do your homework (or believe Micorosft). Thanks for clarifying.

Correct even on xbmc own page they have

Quote:Please understand that we cannot give legal advice regarding your possible implementation of our software. Multimedia licensing/copyrights/patents are very tricky, please contact a software attorney for help with these questions.

So its one of them things if someone wants to legally use xbmc for there product they are almost better off using the frontend of xbmc and doing there own under the hood stuff.

[Omertron]

(01-17-2012 07:03 PM)Milhouse Wrote:  How can I have misunderstood "because the XBMC licence prevents commercial use" - I think that statement is worthy of clarification, as it appears to be patently incorrect.

I apologise, having read the GPL for XBMC, it does not prevent commercial use, although being open source does mean that any changes to the code must be made available.

In my eyes this would prevent a serious competition from arising because a competitor could just take the code and use it themselves.

Quote:As for the "general OS with general XBMC on a pre-installed for you platform" - you've heard of Microsoft Windows Media Center? How is XBMC any different? It's slow progress but there are already companies selling turnkey XBMC solutions, and as the hardware becomes more powerful and cheaper, and as XBMC/OpenELEC improves (and they both are) I think the number of companies offering such solutions will only increase.

Yeah, whatever happened media centre?

[werner]

its simple xbmc breaks a lot off license stuff starting with codecs, movieinfo sites, lol xbmc was started on a hacked XBox SDK .
It is a great thing, but bringing it into a commercial product is not very easy, so what you can do is bringing the Xbox UI to a SOC and the playback stuff stays in a closed area, or else you will get in trouble already, so like using our flash api to handle playback. You need to make sure that you don't break anything which needs licensing,..............

Regards,
Werner

[Milhouse]

(01-17-2012 10:14 PM)Omertron Wrote:  I apologise, having read the GPL for XBMC, it does not prevent commercial use, although being open source does mean that any changes to the code must be made available.

In my eyes this would prevent a serious competition from arising because a competitor could just take the code and use it themselves.

As you say, they must make the code available so if any competitor breached the GPL by not making the code available they could be sued in court, and many have been (including both big and small companies).

With all these risks surrounding open source software I'd be surprised if anyone used it all... oh hang on...

[halfelite]

(01-17-2012 10:25 PM)Milhouse Wrote:  As you say, they must make the code available so if any competitor breached the GPL by not making the code available they could be sued in court, and many have been (including both big and small companies).

With all these risks surrounding open source software I'd be surprised if anyone used it all... oh hang on...

People will use it. just like boxee does. But hence why boxee box struggles they changed the underlying code used for playback. So you take a perfectly working opensource setup but for commercial use you wind up breaking playback or something else along the way a few times, Its not much different then any other player out there.

I think we will see a lot more setups like xtreamer is starting to push out where its an HTPC with no software but could be specifically tailored for certain software to run on it. So being solely a hardware provider without any middleware installed. Only problem with this setup is you have to sale a lot of product to make any money as no one would pay over 100$ for just some blank hardware

[Milhouse]

OpenELEC really is trivial to install and setup. This is of course one way of eliminating all commercial concerns, as the software is not "sold" but it's also a major negative for those incapable of writing an image to a USB memory stick. Maybe someone could devise simple hardware that will do the install itself but only after the user has confirmed the action...

[accident]

(01-17-2012 10:37 PM)Milhouse Wrote:  OpenELEC really is trivial to install and setup.

Plug, play, forget.. that's what 95% of the market wants and the only ones with that cost more than my car.

[Milhouse]

Don't forget that even PCH requires some setup, and NMJ only adds to that. Any moderately capable device requires the user to spend some time setting up the system so really there's not a great deal of difference between XBMC/OpenELEC and PCH in that regard.

[halfelite]

^^pch is the 5% of the market, almost anyone with a hardware player at this time falls into the enthusiast category, Plug play and forget systems as of this time are usually custom install only and cost $10,000+ for a full home system.

[makko]

XBMC is just a ,premulticompiled mediaplayer ,on open source ,wherein lot of injections are possible ,and as mentioned earlier ,a lot of codec are implemented.

[Taxman]

XBMC has been used in commercial projects you just never hear about them as it gets rolled into some other niche system, there is nothing stopping XBMC being used, you do have to pay the codec licensing fees which is exactly what Boxee are doing who are still also using ffmpeg.

Sigma Design's are porting XBMC to their next generation chipsets so it will be part of their SDK they even got/hired Davilla to do the hardware decoding interface for them, obviously this will be Sigma's port of XBMC so they will be picking and choosing what features to use so it will not be a fully featured version of XBMC and licensees will probably have their own ideas too about the GUI and layout.

When will this happen is anyone's guess as it's up to Sigma Design's.

[shieldsit]

Not to argue with anyone here at all, but I've had two PCH A-110's (still have one) and got an AppleTv 2 a few months back. I haven't found a video in my collection that the PCH will play but the AppleTV won't. I will admit that I usually stick with MKV's though.

XBMC makes a huge difference to me. It turns a worthless AppleTV into the device we prefer using. I'm still going to try to find a way to put it on my PCH, my wife just asked me if I could try.

Yes the 2's are only 720's and the new firmware requires a tethered boot. But the 3's do 1080 and I'm sure they will soon have them both jailbroke untethered again.

I dunno. For me I'll take the $99 ATV over the PCH any day. It used to be fun tinkering with YamJ and just HOPING that the PCH would make it through a whole movie, but I'm over that. There are too many devices that just work now for PCH to charge so much and be so buggy. Just my 2 cents!

[lordy]

Apple TV came came out late in September 2010

A110 came out when ? (and was just a repackaging of same video hardware in the A100) which came out when 2007/8? And playing 1080p from back then.

You cant really compare price/performance of tech across generations like this. Look at Raspberry PI etc.

Apple TV def fits may peoples needs for a nice menu 'experience' though. I personally wouldn't get one because I don't like the company and their walled garden.

> I'm still going to try to find a way to put it on my PCH, my wife just asked me if I could try.
> and just HOPING that the PCH would make it through a whole movie,

Why bother? if you find PCH so unstable?