We've been using the old skool XBOX as a media center with XBMC for some time now. XBMC is a great piece of software -- probably the best at what it does. I used the IDE Hot Swap Method to softmod the XBOX back when we lived in Baltimore, but only recently we've been using PlayOn to stream video from the office computer to the XBOX via ethernet.
If I told Nicole how much money we saved by not paying for cable she'd probably be momentarily pleased, but then she'd remember all of the programs that were cut short or all the time I spent fiddling with it.
Being denied The Daily Show for a week I figured is was time to reinstall a new build. Since Microsoft won't open up the system, or XDK, (even though it doesn't develop for it anymore) the only way to obtain new binaries is through illicit means and there are only a few that I know of. Right now it seems to be working great. This is what I've got:
+ T3CH XBMC 2010-01-03 SVN rev26316 from http://t3ch.yi.se/
+ PlayOn Version: 2.59.3664 from http://www.playon.tv
+ PM3HD skin as included with T3CH build
And it seems to be working quite well!
I also just tried a different build, but it couldn't display the PlayOn categories using the same skin.
The Transparency! skin can view all of the categories, but it can't play any from Hulu or CNN - which is a shame because it looks great. The older Rapier skin seems to work well, with Hulu at least, but I'll check out the new release.
One thing that I suspect may have been a problem was the extent of thumbnails that existed in the User directory of the old build. I don't know if XBMC manages these, but I didn't copy them over to the new build.
I'll have to test it out a bit more and decorate with a suitable skin.
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Update:
ReplyDelete-> Same T3CH build
-> Same PlayOn Build
-> Rapier 3.0.6 skin
I've been using that skin since January with few problems. Bramvano has a google code project at:
http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-xbox-skins/
that has an excellent updated list of XBOX ready XBMC skins.
I haven't had anymore interrupted programs, or really weird behavior (like me running into the office to restart the server). And in the off chance that the network slows down, XBOX waits patiently for it to cache up, and keeps on processing.