XBMC with VAAPI on Poulsbo (Intel GMA500) or other VAAPI Systems

It's not possible directly right now due to limitations of the existing GMA 500 drivers (IEGD, PSB, ...) and probably other vaapi drivers. But if you have mplayer-vaapi running, it's really easy - because you can set up xbmc to use external players with XBMC 10.

All you need after having set up mplayer with vaapi is a few adjustments: Set rendering from auto detect to software. Then use a special config file .xbmc/userdata/playercorefactory.xml:

<playercorefactory>                                    
<players>                                            
<player name="mMplayer" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>/home/user/mpl-xbmc</filename>                    
</player>                                                              
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
<rule filetype="avi|mkv|ogm|wmv|mov|m2t|mpg|mp4|m2v" player="DVDPlayer"/>
<rule filetype="avi|mkv|ogm|wmv|mov|m2t|mpg|mp4|m2v" videoresolution="720|1080|1280|1920" player="mMplayer"/>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>

The corresponding script to start mplayer with vaapi (/home/user/mpl-xbmc) looks like this in my case:

mplayer -af volnorm -fs -va vaapi -vo vaapi -softvol -volstep 1 $*

And start xbmc on the console in the foreground, without "&". If you start it with "xbmc &", mplayer will fail to start correctly.

Enjoy! And don't expect wonders. You won't be able to resume and control the way you would with the internal xbmc player. You can just start mplayer using the nice xbmc interface for certain movies.

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