Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.
I still get comments along the lines of ‘remember when you had Netflix before Netflix? Man that was awesome, you could have made billions right?’ from former housemates and friends. I had XBMC in the living room connecting to my server which auto downloaded all the latest tv and movies. So to them i had something much better then Netflix well before Netflix got into online streaming.
I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.
I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
100% Even when I stopped playing Xbox games, we would take that pimped out machine everywhere. Long before there was Netflix, there was an Xbox running XBMC loaded with movies and TV shows of questionable origins. Good times!
I was contracting for Microsoft/MSN building "official" TV media player interfaces (Windows Media Player Extenders I think the hardware was called) at the time. There was definite inspiration in both directions: the XboxMediaPlayer/XBMC folks were looking at what we were putting out and we were looking for clever things they were doing to steal. All our Xboxen were modded. Obviously they won the battle in the end, though :)
24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
I remember installing XBMC with a 360-style "blades" interface and being blown away by how much smoother and nicer it was then the blades interface on the Xbox 360 at the time.
Obviously the OS wasn't doing as much as an Xbox 360 was, but as an end user, it made me perpetually annoyed at what we "could have had" on the 360.
And then Microsoft changed the 360 UI to their windows 8 uwp Tile-style UI with even more ads and I realized that I underestimated how bad things could get.
Apparently the "blades UI" 360s are quite sought after. I wonder if any progress has been made on restoring the stock firmware. I never had one myself unfortunately, mine came preloaded with a later OS.
I remember paying $250+ to some company out in CA and shipping my Xbox to them. Recommended by some friends. A week later it came back modded and a new HD installed. Along with a 10 page guide on how to use xbmc. Including mounting a remote windows share using smb. Or transfer the media files to the Xbox via FTP. This was around 2004. At the time, there wasn’t any easy way to play downloaded or ripped content on a TV from over the network. So a modded Xbox was a game changer.
Lacking any expensive or specialty equipment the procedure was intense.
Fully boot up an XBox. Very carefully remove the IDE cable from the internal Hard Drive.
Start booting a PC. Press the "Pause" key on the keyboard right before BIOS starts it's POST. Very carefully connect the IDE cable from the PC to the XBox Hard Drive. Press any key to resume boot.
Now you can boot the XBMC installer and copy it over to the XBox Hard Drive. Shut everything down. Appropriately connect the Hard Drive. Power back up. You now have a modded XBox.
I also went hardcore hotswap route when uploading my first xbox launcher, followed by eeprom dump and decoding password from that. There are other hardcore methods available:
XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to
assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will
scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it
directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
XBMC really takes me back. I used to love using this, and then when it switched to Kodi I got a bit confused but kept using it. Finally I moved over to Plex because I recall having some issues with Kodi i can't remember these days. But while I love Plex, i don't love the proprietary feeling of it, and would still prefer something truly open.
I loved XBMC and still use Kodi to this day. Back then, I even proposed and POCed what's now a part of their Add-On system, essentially a fuse-like virtual file system forwarded to Python. Before that, each Add-On had to bring its own UI. This was basically my first OSS contribution and the community was really supportive and welcoming.
> Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently.
As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years.
My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.
Yeah, the Pentium 2 and 3 CPUs were very capable. Even today I feel they can do a lot of work with the right tools and some shims to access modern stuff (SSH, RDP).
Maybe XBMC's kernel wasn't designed for multitasking and they're now adding better support. I could understand wanting to throw the whole CPU at whatever the user was doing, especially in early days.
That's some impressive dedication to continue homebrew on the OG Xbox in 2025. Much respect for that alone. Very cool to see such an old console get a first class modern media player experience.
Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!
Fantastic timing on this post. I was just chatting with coworkers this week about my childhood modded Xbox and showed them screenshots of the Avalaunch home screen.
Wow, there’s a trip down memory lane. I remember writing a whole addon called “Tivox Control Station” that let you watch your TiVo recordings on your XBox. Such happy times to be part of that modding community when everything was open and hackable.
I didn't get consoles as a kid, but after moving out I bought my first console - a PS3 I jailbroke.
Showtime/Movian was my TV media player for years, actually worked pretty great until I got a Shield. Cool to see it is still being developed, like XBMC.
I remember modding my Xbox and putting XBMC on it.
One of my fondest memories is actually playing games directly off the hard-drive.
One of the great "side-effects" of that was basically cutting loading times almost in half.
I especially remember the loading animation in the game Crash Bandicoot - Wrath of Cortex. Crash Bandicoot himself would keep falling during the loading screen. (note: PS2 version had another looking version).
The game loading screen for Xbox was designed so that the camera movement nicely panned throughout it during the time the loading took, but due to the loading time being shorter the "animation" was cut short.
..just a fun little thing that stuck with me. :)
EDIT: Oh! I found videos on youtube demonstrating the "difference".
Should have named it XBMC 360 because it has come full circle and it would continue their barbaric culture of naming it 'X' but building it for the complementary set of X. (i.e. it works on everything but XBOX 360)
[+] [-] KeplerBoy|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AnotherGoodName|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe_again|4 months ago|reply
I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
[+] [-] abrookewood|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] qingcharles|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] opello|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cowboyscott|4 months ago|reply
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
[+] [-] pimlottc|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tclancy|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bonsai_spool|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousab|4 months ago|reply
Obviously the OS wasn't doing as much as an Xbox 360 was, but as an end user, it made me perpetually annoyed at what we "could have had" on the 360.
And then Microsoft changed the 360 UI to their windows 8 uwp Tile-style UI with even more ads and I realized that I underestimated how bad things could get.
[+] [-] accrual|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nirav72|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] themafia|4 months ago|reply
Fully boot up an XBox. Very carefully remove the IDE cable from the internal Hard Drive.
Start booting a PC. Press the "Pause" key on the keyboard right before BIOS starts it's POST. Very carefully connect the IDE cable from the PC to the XBox Hard Drive. Press any key to resume boot.
Now you can boot the XBMC installer and copy it over to the XBox Hard Drive. Shut everything down. Appropriately connect the Hard Drive. Power back up. You now have a modded XBox.
[+] [-] rasz|4 months ago|reply
- sniffing IDE bus with Logic Analyzer https://hackaday.com/2011/04/28/ide-bus-sniffing-and-hard-dr...
- reading password directly from locked drive HPA (service area) using MHDD https://hackaday.com/2011/02/18/hard-drive-password-recovery... yes its stored in plaintext
Nowadays the second method is conveniently build into FATXplorer as a one click action https://fatxplorer.eaton-works.com/2024/05/31/fatxplorer-3-0...
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|4 months ago|reply
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
[+] [-] echelon_musk|4 months ago|reply
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox:XCAT
[+] [-] kotaKat|4 months ago|reply
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
[1] http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...
[+] [-] mentos|4 months ago|reply
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
[+] [-] whalesalad|4 months ago|reply
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
> Not on exhibit to the public.
=(
[+] [-] xeromal|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] par|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unbehagen|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AshleyGrant|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] deaddodo|4 months ago|reply
> Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently.
As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years.
My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.
[+] [-] accrual|4 months ago|reply
Maybe XBMC's kernel wasn't designed for multitasking and they're now adding better support. I could understand wanting to throw the whole CPU at whatever the user was doing, especially in early days.
[+] [-] jajuuka|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wildzzz|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GaryBluto|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon_musk|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] caseyf7|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewpick|4 months ago|reply
https://avalaunch.net/
[+] [-] thot_experiment|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] urbandw311er|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kristofferR|4 months ago|reply
Showtime/Movian was my TV media player for years, actually worked pretty great until I got a Shield. Cool to see it is still being developed, like XBMC.
[+] [-] emilbratt|4 months ago|reply
I especially remember the loading animation in the game Crash Bandicoot - Wrath of Cortex. Crash Bandicoot himself would keep falling during the loading screen. (note: PS2 version had another looking version). The game loading screen for Xbox was designed so that the camera movement nicely panned throughout it during the time the loading took, but due to the loading time being shorter the "animation" was cut short.
..just a fun little thing that stuck with me. :)
EDIT: Oh! I found videos on youtube demonstrating the "difference".
Here is the original experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1327&v=jLf9EZWLins
Here is the experience when cut short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1157&v=Vk8AuLhnu58
[+] [-] Shelby-Thomas|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|4 months ago|reply