XBMC and TuneIn on the Ouya | Hacker News Reader

XBMC and TuneIn on the Ouya

kickstarter.com

50 pointsaiham15 comments

Most android developers try to ensure that their apps work with popular devices whether or not there is an official partnership. I can appreciate the PR value of all these 'an existing android app will work with Ouya' announcements, but I thought that ecosystem compatibility was part of the original value proposition.

Ouya adds a couple of other requirements to the "will work with Ouya":

1) Controller Support 2) Must have at least a free demo, if not another free component.

Also it looks like they won't be having the Play Store, meaning that for many (most?) Android title won't work with Ouya.

You don't need play store to get apps to run on Android devices. I know some apps from the Amazon app store won't run without the "Amazon app store" app installed but I've never seen a program depend on Play the same way.

The Android UI toolkit actually already handles controllers relatively well thanks to the use of trackballs and D-pads on first and second generation Android hardware as well as Google TV; non-game apps such as TuneIn and XBMC[0] shouldn't have many issues adapting, if any. (2) is a business model issue, not a technical one.

[0] XBMC is mostly custom, but happens it hails from a controller-based platform to begin with.

Well, pedantically speaking, providing a free app is also a technical issue and not only a business one. Many of the paid apps have no in-app payment set up at all. For the OUYA, you'd need to implement that. Which is easy, but there's still some engineering and design time to invest to adapt (some) apps to the OUYA.

Tho, as an IAP advocate myself, I'd argue that every game dev in their right mind should have that already by now. And I applaud OUYA for "forcing" developers to do the smart thing. But unfortunately, some will still need to adapt.

But you're right, I'm just pointing a detail.

What with it being Android, there's variation in the screen sizes and graphics chips in the hardware you're running on.

If XBMC wants to run with hardware acceleration then that will probably require extra effort to make sure that there are drivers it can work with.

I'm pretty sure OUYA will not have access to the Play Store officially, and they will have their own store, which should also filter out all the apps that aren't specifically made for the TV experience.

So this is more like an "Angry Birds is coming to Kindle Fire" thing. Just because it's compatible, doesn't mean it will be available out of the box, if it doesn't have access to the Play Store, and since it's a much different form factor from phones and tablets, the interfaces will need to be changed quite a bit.

"officially" being the key word there. It's available on any number of mod sites.

f-droid.org comes to mind.

They got it running on Apple TV, I'd hope it would end up on Ouya...

Yeah, but the navigation and UI paradigm they've inherited from being an X-Box project originally kinda sux...

It's really hard to use on apple tv with the remote. So very unintuitive. And they are also heavily invested in their theme engine - we'll have an "android-looking theme" at best, not native UI...

Great news. I really hope the ethernet port is gigabit..

Why? 100mbit will do HD content even from a Bluray M2TS file.

I'm skeptical that the Ouya will be able to decode h.264 Level 4.1 (up to 50 Mbps). Xbox 360 can only handle up to 10Mbps peak of Level 4.1. Thus, the only solution is to transcode to MPEG-2 using something like PS3 Media Server. A 100mbit connection is insufficient for high-quality transcoded MPEG-2 in my experience

Probably the OUYA is a bit too light duty for what you'd like to do. It's primarily an indie games console.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com