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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand the desire for Android on non-touch devices. At all...

The more exciting bit is XBMC being available in Android, in my opinion.

I have XBMC on my desktop, laptop, phone, tablet and raspberry Pi. Using a single app, I can play media from any of those devices to another. It's so simple and elegant and it blows my mind everytime I do it.

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"I still don't understand the desire for Android on non-touch devices. At all..."

I have personal experience with this. My old asus eee 1000 netbook is now an android laptop running ICS. Check out android-x86.org. Its free and easy to set up.

It works. It works Very well. I've got a huge catalog of apps, it does what I want it to do, exactly like my phone. Basically whenever I'm doing something on my phone where I wish I had a bigger screen and a keyboard and better sound... Oh wait I do have such a thing, its called my android laptop. Admittedly 99% of the time its running a SSH app connected to something very big and far away, and a music streamer, so I don't "have" to run android, but it seems by far the simplest way to do what I want.

Also windows is not ready for prime time, as my son's virus/worm/toolbar encrusted desktop shows. That machine is about to become a hackintosh or failing that process, the worlds fastest android desktop...

While it has a touch-screen, my Samsung Galaxy Y Pro, a qwerty keyboard phone with a 320x240 single-touch screen shows that Android works, for the most part, great with landscape aspect ratio screens, single-pointer pointing devices, and physical key navigation.

The ability to run Android apps would be the key. Plus, for an HTPC, Android (tablet UI or Google TV, take your pick) has a much better interface than XBMC, IMO.

But the RPi is an awful HTPC, it's way too underpowered and can only barely cope with 720p decoding. It definitely doesn't cope well with having to do composite overlays like XBMC uses to display controls. The FPS you get in the menus is only also only barely acceptable so even if your content does play the experience is choppy. Yes it's cheap, but it still sucks.

I'm waiting for the day when you can get a raspberry pi style machine that will do full 1080p and will transcode anything I throw at it in real time or faster. It can't be that far off in the future can it? A couple of years maybe?

By then we will all have moved on and you'll be waiting for a raspberry pi style machine that will do full 4320p :p

Damned progress

I found it amusing that "demand progress" is an anagram for your comment, alluding to the love/hate relationship we have with technological advancement.

Do you have a source for this? All the reviews I have read claim that 1080p playback on the RPi is smooth.

with my pi/raspbmc the 1080p movie playback is indeed smooth but the menus stutter awfully. But the reason for that might be that the menus doesn't fully utilize the opengl es of the pi or something else (bad skin?) so I wouldn't blame the pi yet.

That seems to be a common issue with UI on the Pi... I think a few things are going to need to be rewritten to push work away from the CPU and onto the GPU.

Waiting with baited breath for mine to turn up! :-)

Nah, look at the history of XBMC (started on the Xbox), it's a nasty piece of work when rendering to the screen.

However, it was very naive of the grandparent poster to think that slow CPU powered menu screens means that the hardware accelerated video is lacking.

I never even mentioned the CPU speed. I didn't say the hardware decoding was lacking (which it is, since it can't decode most of my BluRay rips in real time) I said it made an awful HTPC, which it does because the UI FPS is awful and whether or not your content will actually play depends on a bunch of technical factors I can't be bothered to keep track of.

This is why I hope they will port Jelly Bean to it as well, so it doesn't stutter anymore.

It depends on the exact encoding parameters of the content. Certain container formats and decoder options decode better. Some content does playback fine but I have a large amount of higher bitrate content that doesn't play well.

Part of why I use XBMC is because it will play almost anything you throw at it. Sticking it on extremely resource constrained hardware gets rid of that feature.

I don't know about that. I have seen Android on OpenPandora (whose performance is similar to that of the Raspberry Pi, more or less) and lots of applications ran just like on my Android Galaxy S phone. Most games (even 3d ones) were working fine, too. It's definitely not going to be the best Android device around, but it will run many things well, I am confident about that.

I this from personal experience? Yesterday I played a little with Raspbmc[0](XBMC based distro) on my Pi. Besides a brief pause when changing menus/start-playing everything is silky-smooth. Including 1080p video playing. And this was while running from a crappy 3MBs SD card.

[0] http://www.raspbmc.com/

That's... not true. Have you tried a recent XBMC build on Raspbian?

No, it doesn't play my 13GB copy of Tron, but it plays every single 720p MKV I've thrown at it.

For me the appeal is hacking with the Android source on a low cost, unbrickable device.

Having said that, I've always read that ICS requires 512MB of RAM, so we'll have to see how it runs

I have to say that confused me too. The 512MB limit I thought was serious. It may be the case that the Pi is using a large swap partition on the SD card?

Google themselves recommend 384 MB of RAM for ICS. Since Raspberry Pi has a pretty powerful GPU, I hope they bring Jelly Bean to it, too, for a smoother experience.

You could make the RPi into a touch device...

Getting Android running is just one step along the way to getting ChromeOS running (and that effort has already started).

No. It's not. ChromeOS has nothing to do with Android.

The work required to port Android to RP is very similar to the work needed to port ChromeOS.

Exactly. Android on an underpowered device like the Pi is going to be underwhelming.

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