Xbox Media Centre – A Journey to Media Bliss
I don’t remember what first led me to find out about the wonderful Xbox Media Centre. Perhaps it was a post on J. River’s Media Centre support forums as I was searching for something else; perhaps it was a random google search. Whatever it was, I thought, “hmm…”, and filed the knowledge of this software’s existence into some dusty corner of my mind. There, it grew, nagging at me, a constant temptation — to which I finally succumbed to.
Boy am I glad I did. XBMC is the slickest, most versatile media centre I have yet encountered. Let me tell you how I did it…
It all started fairly inoccuously. I’m a big movie / media buff. I have gigs upon gigs of mp3s and all kinds of videos (anime fansubs, recorded TV shows, etc.). Ever since I can remember, I’ve been dreaming of the best method to make this library easily accessible on my entertainment centre. And by easily, I mean in a wife-proof sense — that is, it should be as easy as operating a tv or dvd player.
My previous setup had my computer hooked up to the television, my secondary sound card outputting audio to the surround speakers. This was feasible because in our current apartment, we don’t have a den — so the computer has to be beside the TV anyway. This will not be the case once we move (although I will set up a home LAN that will reach every room.) This setup was still not ideal, as I had to turn on the TV output on the computer, switch the sound over to the alternate sound card, and browse for the video I wanted using the mouse and keyboard.
Now I know J. River Media Centre, Windows Media Centre, and the myriad of other PVR / MediaPC software can do what I want. The main problem with these is I need a full fledged computer to run them, and preferably not my desktop (since it won’t be in the living room forever — not to mention I might want to use it for other things while the TV is going). Also, I’ve found J. River’s offering bloated, sluggish, and difficult to find and set up the features I want to use.
That’s why the XBMC idea was so attractive. I could set up a cheap, silent PC, which was networked, to play all my media at the touch of a button! Exactly what I wanted. If I wanted to make a silent, Media PC of equivalent power, even using Linux, it would cost me a pile of money and take a heck of a lot of time. Plus, with XBMC, I could play games! The Xbox 360 also has some media centre functionality, but is tied to Microsoft software and severely limited in the content it can play. It’s also a lot more expensive and doesn’t have the years of hacking knowledge behind it.
So last week I finally had some time, hopped onto Craigslist and found an old Xbox for $100. There were probably a few better deals out there (i.e. ones that came with many more games) but I had succumbed to this particular temptation and wanted it now.
The first order of the day was modding the xbox. This is necessary since Microsoft took some security measures to prevent people from running random code on their console (such as home-copied games). Luckily, there are always creative and ingenious people at work in the world breaking into things, so there are a number of ways to ‘mod’ the xbox to get it to run whatever one wants. Apparently, I could go to Pacific Mall, for example, and get it modded or order a modchip and do it myself. It all seemed like a lot of work, considering there are plenty of great, working softmods out there.
A good place for lots of info and tutorials for the xbox is xbox-scene.org, although it took me a little while to realize that 90% of the data is outdated. Or you can try a google search, which turned up this guide. [Local cache]
You can get most of the software you need from bittorrent trackers like mininova, and on xbins. To actually get the files, you need to embark on a bit of a quest… Log into IRC (I use ChatZilla, since it’s free and much easier to install than the ubiquitous mIRC), connect to efnet, and ‘/join #xbins’; then type ‘/msg xbins !list’. This will get you a password to the FTP server where you can grab all the goodies.
In order to minimally mess with my new xbox, I tried to follow Razz’s guide, even going to ordering a USB cable online. Armed with a couple of USB drives, a copy of the Action Replay program, and the Softmod Installer Deluxe (obtained from the AutoInstaller Deluxe package off mininova.org — you can also find torrent links at their official site), I tried. I really did. Unfortunately I could not get my USB drives to be detected by the Action Replay program, even after hacking the .inf (they were just detected as USB drives, as they normally should be).
So I gave up, and went for the big guns — modding by hotswapping the drive via xboxhdm. I followed the guide pretty much exactly. Instructions to take the xbox apart are all over the web. Here’s a local copy in case the forums go down.
After that I actually ended up swapping out the 8 GB Xbox HD for a 250 GB one (W00t!), using the steps in the guide above. Everything works really well. Even my fiancee seemed impressed!!
Well, now I need to get some actual work done… with music playing in the background… hehe….
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