Anyone who has a modded Xbox probley knows the incredible open source media center software that is XBMC... it is now in the VERY early stages of being ported to windows,linux, and mac!
download the XBMCSetup-revxxxx.exe file here and simply install to any folder. From there your on your own, but some help can be found on the XBMC forum. (and for those who don't know sourceforge is a very well respected opensource comunity... no viruses/malware there).
I've been useing XBMC on my old xbox for years now and it is a great skinable media center... so many incredible skins to be found! I hope progress is quick in getting all the features over to windows.
Find more, (much nicer), skins here, you'll need a Subversion client like TortiseSVN which is free and simple).
I actually tried this out a couple weeks ago but only for a little. I really like the XMBC software but don't want a XBox in my room. What I'm looking for is a very nice looking "Video Store" interface where I can browse movies by various categories, see a cover picture and have some info (year, plot, actors, etc) displayed. I don't need any pvr functions.
XMBC looked like a good choice but the ported version was confusing to me. I've just started trying to set up MythTV (Mythbuntu) to use its MythVideo portion but I'm not liking what I see.
XBMC is one of the great custom apps I've ever used or known of, the community that made it is incredibly talented.
I run a soft-modded xbox in my home theater set up, we are moving this summer into a larger house and I may very well pick up another used xbox on Ebay and create a second home theater room.
XBMC is truly a great product.
PS: Wow! Just checked out the skin in the link directly above, man, that is awesome, it's going on my machine!
Also check out Back-row skin, it's great for a HTPC! (actually good idea download all those in the SVN if you haven't checked out the new skin features latley... some very creative new effects in some).
After playing around with the windows version it seems to woork fine for basic video/music playback. Having mouse problems with some skins but the keyboard always works.
heybirder, MythTV is great for PVR but not so good as a media library. If you are interested in a n open source Linux alternative, Elisa looks very interesting at http://elisa.fluendo.com. No personal experience yet, just something I found because I wanted a better alternative for these functions then MythTV.
Just tried out XBMC for windows on XP. I am very impressed with its media playback interface. Unfortunately, it locked up my system after a few minutes of playing around with it.
Yea It's about as beta as you can get right now... the much more developed xbox version is rock solid though, I've been useing it for years as a HT media center to stream off the computer.
Hopefully they can port that reliability over, but I guess the programing environment is totally different for PC... requiring almost a total rewrite of the software.
I also noticed that CPU usage is very high. Video playback uses about 60% CPU on an AMD 5200+ where some other app's use about 10%. Maybe it's running on some type of emulator. Nice interface though. Let's hope the Windows port gets finished.
The cheapest and best way is to softmod it... putting in a modchip is risky as you must solder points on the xbox board.
A softmod is totally reversible and you don't even have to open the xbox, (unless you want to add a larger HD, which is a whole other can of worms and unnecessary if you plan to just stream content from a PC etc.)
To softmod you just need a ORIGINAL copy of Mechassault game, (no platinum hits version), and a way to get a special savegame to a xbox memory card, (know someone with a modded xbox or a Action Replay?)
Modding an xbox to run Linux is legit, but the software used to encode programs like XBMC is owned by M$, making the software notlegit so I won't be able to help you there.
Will the XBMC for PC work with Vista? The reason I'm asking is that my BR drive to work I need to run it on Vista (64 bit). I also want to run all my video files through XBMC. Can I run both Vista (64 bit) for my BR drive AND XBMC for all my other video content?
Did a little more research and found some answers. I can run Vista 32 bit, and also XBMC. XBMC won't handle a BR player directly at this current time due to DRM restrictions. But to play discs directly, I could just use MCE for Windows and my BR drive.
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