The document I pointed to said unaligned accesses have been supported by ARM since armv6. Every arm supported by xbmc is new enough to support that.
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The ARMv6 architecture introduced the first hardware support for unaligned accesses.  ARM11 and Cortex-A/R processors can deal with unaligned accesses in hardware, removing the need for software routines.
```
I don't understand why we should not rely on a feature of a chip that is documented as being supported and improves performance.

If you are seeing warnings from this code can you post them? It compiles cleanly for me.