After noting the success of the XBMC team in getting high-quality video playback on the Raspberry Pi, I tried to see what was currently possible with the latest version of the APC kernel..   Sadly, the XBMC player is only available for the proprietary Pi Broadcom chipset..    I did try installing the binary-only Android APC player, but it was – as I expected – not compatible with the compiled kernel or Fedora 13..

I installed GCC and the associated compiler components, and managed to (natively) compile the x264 library, and also mplayer.  Xine (a real blast from the past!) was already available in rpm format, but failed to work, as it could not find the right codecs (not surprisingly..)

After changing some permissions, and group membership (‘video’ and ‘audio’ groups) I did get mplayer to play a small mp4 file, but it was very sluggish..    The framebuffer output takes over the entire screen, which is not ideal, and I need to find a way of changing this..

Next, I am going to try changing the user/kernel memory allocations in the kernel.   Currently set to ‘3G/1G’ user/kernel, but I will try reversing this, to see what effect it has..