I’m a huge proponent of Xbox Media Center. That is, an old Xbox, chipped, with XBMC installed on it, to make it the ultimate SD media center ever in the world of the history of everything (you can make it go HD, but it requires changing the CPU and getting special cables). I literally had my Xbox chipped the day I got it (DMCA? I don’t think so.), some 5 – 6 years ago, and I’ve been loving it ever since.
Best of all, it will play anything. Any non-DRM’d format you throw at it; plays it. Is your film rar’d and zip’d and split into 100 files, packed in an ISO and in VOB files?… Guess what? Yep, plays it.
Indeed, XBMC is pretty incredible. I was fully blown away when I accidentally clicked an ISO and it played it like a regular video file. Even with an Xbox 360 and PS3 in my living room, I still (have to) resort to using my old Xbox with XBMC for watching downloaded TV shows, etc.
I’m not going to go as far as to swap out the CPU so it can handle HD, though. The HR (half res) versions look pretty great. I figured if the day comes when I absolutely have to be streaming HD content, I’ll grab an AppleTV and hack it to add the Xvid/Divx codecs.
Thankfully the xbox 360 is thoroughly crippled with a hypervisor and epoxy’ed circuits, so we won’t have any of that homebrew tomfoolery on that otherwise perfectly capable hardware.
Yeah, psh; and how about that! Good thing I’m not allowed to play around with what’s inside the box, which I bought for my own money, and own, and have.
Ditto. XBMC is the greatest.
Lifehacker mentions their Xbox running wirelessly… am I missing something here? Cos mine is wired and afaik doesn’t have a wireless receiver.
Heh, the lifehacker article actually made me go on eBay and buy an Xbox for XBMC last week. Not that we really needed another media player in our dorm, but it just sounded so cool :). But it’s gonna have to be real good to replace our PC running Mediaportal…
Well you could (maybe still can), get a kit, which plugged into the Xbox and made it ‘wireless’. I personally have it chained into our living room Airport. So I also stream stuff, which works great.
Hmm. Makes sense.
On another note, I think I’ve mentioned this to you, personally, before, but there’s a Linux port project in the works. If they succeed, it means Xbox Media Center on any linux capable devices which means Playstation 3 (with no modding ). Apple TV too?
Now if only the PS3 wasn’t so godawful and expensive. THAT would be a media center.
how bigs your xbox hard drive? mines about 120 – 150..GB
Edit, damn fumbly fingers.
Let me get out the measuring tape, heh heh.
But seriously. 80 GB.
Hah :)
I’ve got an 80 as well (couple of 120’s in the drawer, but I can’t be bothered with formatting them for the Xbox). I stream all my stuff from my two 250GB disks hooked up to my Mac mini anyway.
Most of it is series and stuff like that, which is downloaded, watched and discarded within a day anyway.