So this has been a pet project of mine for a while now, and it's finally starting to come together so I decided to post it here.
I love AndroidTV, and have a Nexus Player I really love using. When CM came out for the Nexus Player and I discovered that all it takes to make a 'regular' Android distribution an AndroidTV is a set of apps (by using the CM Leanback Gapps), I figured - why not apply this to an Android x86 build (Nexus Player is x86 too after all) and have myself an AndroidTV HTPC on my current PC?
Well, at first it didn't work because the Android 5.* builds weren't steady enough and wouldn't run on my HTPC without freezing, but once MESA (the open source driver libraries) were introduced - BAM! I got it up and running, flashed the Leanback GAPPS and.....
IT LIVES!
Almost.
When I reboot it I was greeted with the setup menu, however to my dismay - no Leanback Launcher (though I suspect it may have been due to the method I used to flash GAPPS, which is just copy over all the files through ADB), and also video playback currently doesn't work (which I understand is a problem with all Androidx86 5.* builds at the moment), but the cast receiver works (and receives casts - just can't play them because of the video playback issue) and I'm betting that with a little tweaking (or perhaps precompiling the build with the leanback gapps already baked inside) I can get all the software features (including leanback launcher) to work! For now we just have to wait for Android 5.* to mature well enough to fix video playback, but the future is promising!
I'll keep you posted with whatever I manage to come up with in the future, but I'm sure the fine devs here at XDA can beat me to it and get it working well sooner! (I'm not really a dev, just a tinkerer).
I love AndroidTV, and have a Nexus Player I really love using. When CM came out for the Nexus Player and I discovered that all it takes to make a 'regular' Android distribution an AndroidTV is a set of apps (by using the CM Leanback Gapps), I figured - why not apply this to an Android x86 build (Nexus Player is x86 too after all) and have myself an AndroidTV HTPC on my current PC?
Well, at first it didn't work because the Android 5.* builds weren't steady enough and wouldn't run on my HTPC without freezing, but once MESA (the open source driver libraries) were introduced - BAM! I got it up and running, flashed the Leanback GAPPS and.....
IT LIVES!
Almost.
When I reboot it I was greeted with the setup menu, however to my dismay - no Leanback Launcher (though I suspect it may have been due to the method I used to flash GAPPS, which is just copy over all the files through ADB), and also video playback currently doesn't work (which I understand is a problem with all Androidx86 5.* builds at the moment), but the cast receiver works (and receives casts - just can't play them because of the video playback issue) and I'm betting that with a little tweaking (or perhaps precompiling the build with the leanback gapps already baked inside) I can get all the software features (including leanback launcher) to work! For now we just have to wait for Android 5.* to mature well enough to fix video playback, but the future is promising!
I'll keep you posted with whatever I manage to come up with in the future, but I'm sure the fine devs here at XDA can beat me to it and get it working well sooner! (I'm not really a dev, just a tinkerer).
