VidOn.me Publishes A New XBMC Source Tree

"VidOn.me has an Allwinner A20 based media player called VidOn.me AV100 that they are using a forked version for XBMC on, which unlike upstream mainline XBMC features full hardware accelerated video decoding and full Blu-ray Disc menu support, but like many Chinese companies VidOn.me have previously not released all the source code changes and modification as they are required to as XBMC is licensed under GPLv2 (GPL version 2), meaning their code have never had a chance to make it into upstream mainline XBMC as per the GPL, but now it looks like they might have released their latest code to comply with the GPL", wrote a Phoronix reader this morning.

VidOn.me going back at least two years has had a commercial fork of the XBMC multimedia center software and shipped hardware devices with their media player fork running atop Android and offered complete hardware acceleration. While they or their associates, have reportedly sponsored XBMC in the past, there's been numerous reports about their violation of XBMC's GPL license with not releasing their source modifications. Originally, they also stripped out all references to XBMC.

Harley, a Phoronix reader, wrote in today to say that it looks like they might be fully in compliance now with this GitHub repository with commits as of six days ago that appears to be their forked version of XBMC. However, I nor the one providing the news tip have yet been able to corroborate this first-hand. "VidOn.me have updated their repository for their XBMC fork on GitHub.com with new source code, which now looks to contain a new video player 'core' for Allwinner A20 (and I guess Allwinner A10 too since both uses the same CedarX VPU - Video Processor Unit) to decode videos."

We'll hopefully find out soon enough whether this is their full, build-able source tree and whether any of the acceleration code will be of use to upstream XBMC developers.