Look - if you don’t have an abundance of cash but you need a rockin’ media center device, look no further than an old XBOX. Go down to your nearest video game store and relieve them of that old black box behind the counter. The older the better. I bought mine refurbished from Future Shop…
Better yet, find a remote control for the original XBOX on Ebay and you’ll have the makings for a better media center than any of those shiny new devices you’ll find in the big box electronic stores today.
There are two ways to go in getting this thing ready to perform for you. You have to decide whether or not to do a soft-mod or hard-mod to the XBOX. The soft-mod is free, whereas the hard-mod is about 50 bucks but makes your XBOX more robust if you are the tinkering type. A buddy of mine has done the soft-mod on two XBOXES with great results, and mine is hard-modded.
I hard-modded mine mostly for research purposes. (lol - but true - the side benefit of having it dishing out torrents for my big screen TV is most excellent) You see, I was interested in how the XBOX could be used for bad guys (criminals lets say) to hide data on these devices without anyone (police) knowing that there was in fact regular data being stored on the hard drive inside the XBOX. With a modded XBOX and one of the huge ATA6 hard drives now on the market inside it, it basically becomes a NAS appliance able to hold tons of data in a place that way too many investigators fail to think to look in. Anyway, I digress…
The real point of this article was to illustrate how cheaply one can create a mediacenter device and breathe life back into an old XBOX. My best advice for anyone willing to modify their old XBOX is to do the following:
- Find a game that has a flaw that allows you to exploit the console
- Exploit the console
- Find and download the latest version of xboxmediacenter
- Install that on the original hard drive as the default dashboard
- Set up one of your computers on your network to stream your movies and music (and photos for that matter) to the XBOX as requested. Basically the XBOX can connect to windows shares as required.
- Modify the appropriate config file on the xbox as required using an FTP program. The default is usually xbox:xbox for authentication
- Enjoy.
For roughly $100-150 bucks you will have a mediacenter device that rivals most of the other hardware devices out there. it will be able to play xVid, D i v X, and most other encoded movies. Forget burning them to DVD for your DVD player. That is so last year…
Cheers.
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