This thread is quite confusing, but I don't want to open a new one, so I'll post here.
First of all boblight consist of two parts, the client and the demon.
A client is the machine that its display you want to analyze and send this information to the demon.
For example a client it's a RPi running XBMC, and you want to analyze the video that is played.
A demon is the machine that can receive this information and lights the leds according to it.
My idea is to have RPi running as both the client and the demon.
Getting the RPi act as a demon should be a piece of cake, there's really nothing to it.
Getting the RPi act as a client would require much more development skills.
I'm no developer and I'm a bit linux n00b, but from what I think happens (without really understanding the source code):
Boblight for linux has 3 clients:
1. boblight-X11 for the application that use x-org, maybe xbmc gui, maybe even analyze images.
2. boblight-constant nothing really analyzed, maybe just sending constant color scheme.
3. boblight-v4l this is the client used to analyze video (note the videograbber.cpp file).
(I'm continuing with my guessing)
The RPi has a dedicated video player, omxplayer, to decode video & audio utilizing the openmax api, the v4l library isn't used by omxplayer so the boblight-v4l has no info to analyze.
As Dom mention above to get Boblight client on the RPi you'll need to get the info by using openmax api.
Regards Dom's goodwill and development abilities to help in the matter:
Please have a look at the source files in the library boblight-v4l of the boblight project at
http://code.google.com/p/boblight/
Just to make thing clearer:
XBMC boblight addon for linux use the same boblight client as mention above.
I haven't done much research in the matter but there probably more than few of these philips ambilight clones clients, but for linux I believe boblight is the default.