[HN Gopher] XBMC 4.0 for the Original Xbox
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XBMC 4.0 for the Original Xbox
Author : zdw
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-11-21 15:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.xbox-scene.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.xbox-scene.info)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| XBMC on the original Xbox was so unbelievably far ahead of it's
| time, it's crazy and that's not just nostalgia talking.
| pimlottc wrote:
| XBMP is the main reason I got my Xbox, it was fantastic. And
| later I even played a few games on it!
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| Yes! So many streaming sources and high
| performance/responsiveness.
| cowboyscott wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't think Xbox had 1080p support? That would be somewhat
| annoying to be limited by.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| 1080i though
| jsheard wrote:
| It could output analogue 720p and 1080i for sure, but the
| CPU had a hard time keeping up with HD video decoding. It
| was only a 733mhz Pentium 3 after all.
|
| Although to go on a tangent, it turned out that you could
| swap the _soldered_ BGA processor for a _socketed_ 1.4ghz
| Pentium meant for a desktop PC, using an incredibly
| cursed interposer setup to redirect the CPU pins to the
| right BGA pads, and it somehow actually worked.
| TapamN wrote:
| Wow, you're not kidding saying that it's cursed. I
| thought it would adapt a socket to the BGA pads, but it
| looks like the pins of the replacement CPU just sit naked
| on the interposer.
|
| https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=95704
| jsheard wrote:
| I think Pentium 3 sockets were through-hole, so to use
| one they would have had to fit two different footprints
| on the bottom side of the interposer without any overlap.
| It might not have been physically possible.
| boilerupnc wrote:
| this is my goto for xbox gen1 HDMI - Electronxout[0].
| Here's a full list of video options[1]
|
| [0] https://electron-shepherd.com/products/electronxout
|
| [1] https://www.xbox-scene.info/forums/topic/657-list-of-
| all-og-...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?
|
| With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or
| 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still
| originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox
| can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable
| of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).
| afavour wrote:
| You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it
| was incredible for its time but not even being able to play
| 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get
| today.
| cowboyscott wrote:
| Spec-wise, sure, but I suspect that if you ran a blind test
| between an Xbox running XBMC and an Amazon Fire Stick, most
| folks would prefer the XBMC experience (despite the 720p
| output).
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| robofunk wrote:
| If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies
| from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic.
| IYKYK
| notyourwork wrote:
| Oh yea - and DCC transfers for content from IRC. mmmmm
| bombcar wrote:
| Being able to play VIDEO_TS files _directly_ blew my mind;
| no need to argue about compression with our massive 250 GB
| drives ... ;)
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| Yeah that part was amazing. It was 2006, I'd softmoded the
| Xbox with the Splinter Cell hack. I had 2MBs ADSL capped @
| 10GB for international data but unlimited national. I was
| in a NZ only private tracker to take advantage of that and
| then the icing on the cake, streaming the multi volume rar
| files straight to the TV. It really was magic.
| Sanzig wrote:
| I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I
| was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment
| that it really was _far_ ahead of its time. I 'd torrent a
| movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I
| could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious
| 480p on a tube TV.
|
| This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt
| like something from the future.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Crazy this was about 20 years ago...
| notyourwork wrote:
| And now streaming services are becoming "cable networks".
| Capitalism at its finest.
| asdff wrote:
| "Cut the cord and stop paying $80/mo" Funny how that was
| just representative of the money left on the table that
| was to be snatched up anyhow before long.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Cabled offered far less content, with far less
| convenience, with far more ad breaks, for far more money.
|
| The current situation is far preferable to being
| restricted to a specific screen in your home, controlled
| by a specific box, usable only with long term contracts,
| where you had to wait on hold on the phone and be home
| during 4 hour windows for a technician just to get
| something installed or canceled.
| nativeit wrote:
| Key word there is "current". It's quickly moving the
| other way.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Which way? The only movement is increasing monthly
| prices, which should be expected given inflation.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I didn't have wired networking everywhere in the house. So
| I would torrent the latest episode of a TV show (before it
| released in my own country) at something like 45 kbps. At
| 350 MiB it was usually possible to watch the episode the
| same evening I started the download. Once it was finished
| I'd have to carry the box upstairs to FTP the episode to
| the Xbox's HDD and then carry it back down again to connect
| to the TV.
|
| Later, I would run Azureus inside of a Linux distro on the
| Xbox to download content directly.
|
| Great times.
| jwiz wrote:
| 350MB so 2 would fit on a standard CDROM.
| phantasmish wrote:
| I've never been able to get another family member to
| successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for
| "this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying
| to do something basic".
|
| I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but
| me ever used it.
|
| Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-
| mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background
| but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and
| struggled to figure out how to get back.
|
| And no, alternative skins never improved that any.
|
| Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV,
| have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it
| up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing
| any help.
|
| I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use
| case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case.
| Among other problems.
|
| Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to
| watching-stuff ratio finally isn't terrible (great, actually)
| and other people can use the system.
|
| [edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be
| not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean "back" but in
| different ways. :-/
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally
| bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its
| biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote
| controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing
| content.
|
| 1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated
| stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map
| those functions to a single "do something" remote button,
| or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal
| direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to
| this day, I am not really confident about what it's going
| to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause?
| Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of
| overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs
| simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote
| control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention
| which yes, is terrible.
|
| 2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly
| does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been
| getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit
| unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle
| scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When
| I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have
| that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to
| have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work,
| awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?"
|
| 3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own
| "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just
| terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo
| that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then
| go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan
| and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can
| tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And
| fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a
| file.
|
| That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It
| has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice
| things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor
| info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying
| enough for me to take the time to try something else like
| Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be
| motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their
| web site what they offer that differentiates them from
| Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Jellyfin's a media _server_ first and foremost.
|
| Out of the box, what you get is a server with
| (Optionally! But included by default in e.g. the Docker
| image, I think) an official web UI.
|
| It's multi-user, has decent parental controls, automatic
| metadata fetching from a bunch of sources, can live-
| transcode when a client needs it (I have that disabled
| because my server is too weak, LOL), lots of good stuff.
|
| You'll manage it through the Web UI, mostly. Set-top
| platform clients tend not to include much in the way of
| management features. (which is fine, it's way more
| pleasant to do that through a browser)
|
| The web UI is also a Netflix-alike interface. Watch
| straight from the browser, if you like.
|
| -------------
|
| The one major concession that puts some people off it is
| that it works _butter_ smooth if your file naming
| conventions match what it expects, but it gets a lot
| less-pleasant if they don 't. There are some minor
| variations allowed but mine's basically like:
| /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).mp4
| /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now
| (1979).en.srt /movies/Apocalypse Now
| (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).fr.srt
| /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) -
| Redux.mp4 /movies/Apocalypse Now
| (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.en.srt
| /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) -
| Final Cut.mkv /movies/Apocalypse Now
| (1979)/extras/The Making of Apocalypse Now.mkv
| /movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/Trailer.mkv
|
| For movies. This demonstrates naming for the movies
| themselves (in this case, three different cuts of the
| same movie), extra features (you can change the extra
| features folder name if you like; it may default to
| "featurettes" and I may have changed mine, can't recall
| for sure) and external subtitles. I think you can handle
| external audio files similarly, if you have any of that
| going on. There are also ways to categorize special
| features into like trailers or whatever, with
| directories, but I haven't bothered with that.
|
| I think there is a way to put your subtitles in a "subs"
| directory or something like that, but I don't do it. Then
| again I rarely keep more than two sub languages, maybe
| three or four total files if there are separate SDH
| options, for a given video. Usually just English and if
| it's a foreign film maybe the original language's
| subtitles (the French file for Apocalypse Now above is
| just an example, I didn't look at a real directory to
| write it)
|
| For TV: /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season
| 0/s00e08 - Reunion.mkv /tv/The Wire (2002)/Season
| 0/s00e10 - Season 1 gag reel.mkv /tv/The Wire
| (2002)/Season 1/s01e01.mkv /tv/The Wire
| (2002)/Season 1/s01e02 - The Detail.mkv
|
| The naming on these is pretty flexible. Basically as long
| as it can find the series (the year helps _a lot_ ) and
| everything's got `sXXeXX` somewhere in it, it'll be fine.
| Spaces, dots, dashes, doesn't affect much. "asdf.s03e05 -
| Some Name (stuff in parens).mkv" will find TheTVDB's
| entry for season 3, episode 5 (even if the name and all
| that in the file name are wrong, doesn't matter, it
| ignores that). External subtitles work like for movies
| (just stick them alongside the video files)
|
| One pitfall: every now and then you find a case where
| DVD/BluRay and aired orders differ. TheTVDB usually
| records multiple orders in these cases. I dunno how to
| force Jellyfin to prefer one or the other, I just figure
| out which it's preferring (usually the one TheTVDB shows
| you on the Web by default, I think?) and adjust to that.
|
| Also note that rarely (but sometimes for important cases,
| like e.g. Looney Tunes) TheTVDB uses _years_ for the
| seasons. So you 'll want "Season 1965" and such for
| those. No big deal, just a weird quirk of certain shows'
| metadata. Not that common.
|
| I think you can name the "specials" directory to...
| specials, and maybe even give it an arbitrary name in the
| Jellyfin settings, but I like "Season 0" or "Season 00"
| (either works, prepended zeros are ignored, I have both
| hanging around) because it matches the special episode
| naming in TheTVDB (like "s00eXX").
|
| In a pinch, you can override which IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB,
| et c. ID that Jellyfin decided belonged to the movie or
| TV show, using the web UI, and make it re-scrape the
| metadata. Usually it's better to figure out why it got it
| wrong and fix that instead--that way you don't even have
| to care about Jellyfin's database of scanned metadata,
| you can always just have it re-create it from scratch
| with little or no fuss. (and you can also set it to write
| the metadata alongside your shows and movies in files,
| like Kodi can)
|
| I _think_ there might be a way to put things like IMDB
| IDs directly in file names to make it even more clear
| what you mean, but "name (year)" has been so reliable
| for me I've never bothered to look into it.
|
| I base my naming and years on what I find in the metadata
| sources themselves, usually IMDB and TheTVDB for me.
| Surprisingly often, Wikipedia disagrees with these, and
| sometimes [ahem] _acquired_ files also have file names
| recording years that disagree with those sources. Usually
| it seems to be a festival-circuit vs. wide-release thing,
| as those often fall in different years. The metadata
| source should win, since otherwise it 'll make auto-
| scanning worse.
|
| Some people are _really_ set on things like having their
| movies categorized in folders by director or whatever,
| and that doesn 't work too well with Jellyfin.
|
| (I know that file naming explanation is _a lot_ , but
| it's really not that complicated in practice, and there
| are docs but I found there were some "but can I..." or
| "is it necessary to..." gaps in it for me that I've tried
| to fill in above)
|
| DESPITE the impression probably given by all that text,
| I've found this one of the greatest parts of Jellyfin.
| Delete a file? After a couple minutes, it's gone from the
| UI. Add some files? In a couple minutes, they show up.
| (and you can force re-scans to speed it up). Slightly
| rename a file? But Jellyfin still reads it as the same
| movie from its metadata source? Your watch history
| survives. Hell I think you can even delete a movie, then
| add it again later, and your watch history survives (as
| long as Jellyfin decides it's the same movie by ID).
| There's no _cruft_ that hangs around to deal with. It 's
| very low-stress. Like 99% of my "management" of Jellyfin
| is just rsycing files, LOL.
|
| -----------
|
| As for non-Web clients:
|
| - There's an official Roku client, but... most Roku
| devices have pretty limited codec support. The client
| works _great_ though. If your server can transcode, this
| may be a totally fine choice. It 's what I used for quite
| a while until enough of my files were in formats newer
| than h.264 that it was no longer viable.
|
| - AppleTV has an official client. It's pretty good,
| but... if you can't transcode, there's one somewhat-
| common Dolby audio format (I forget which exactly) that
| AppleTV doesn't have a license to, so it causes problems.
| However, for that problem there's:
|
| - Infuse (also AppleTV). It's amazing. The recent release
| supports multiple user accounts with different server
| access settings (not only can they log into Jellyfin with
| different credentials, they could conceivably use totally
| different servers), which is brilliant if you want
| parental controls or just to have different "watched"
| lists. It's free but there's a paid version with a few
| extra features that includes a license to that tricky
| audio format. I've been using this for years, at this
| point, and aside from wishing it supported multiple
| accounts (and it does now, as of very recently!) I've had
| no trouble with it at all. Also, Infuse supports other
| media servers as backends.
|
| There are clients for tons of other platforms, too. And
| you can always Airplay or whatever from (say) a laptop.
|
| ----------
|
| For going on the road (and short of taking your server
| with you) I have used two options:
|
| - You can just use it directly over a VPN to your house,
| like Tailscale, if the client end's connection is solid
| (and your home connection is good, for that matter). I've
| streamed mid-quality 4K over such an arrangement, halfway
| across the US. You can even connect an AppleTV to
| Tailscale and take the AppleTV with you (it's much
| smaller than most servers, lol) for the full at-home
| experience while traveling (Christmas movie marathon at
| the in-laws' house this holiday season?)
|
| - Long road trip with the kids and want them to watch
| _Apollo 13_ (and perhaps a couple Disney movies) while
| you drive to Cape Canaveral? Browse your Jellyfin web UI
| on the tablet they 'll use, and download the file(s) you
| want straight from there. Play files in VLC. Done, no
| internet connection required. Being able to use the web
| UI is nice because you can browse categories and such,
| it's actually a fair bit better than something like using
| an SFTP client.
| kijiki wrote:
| I run kodi via OSMC on a Vera V.
|
| It comes with a dedicated remote (though it does support
| CEC), which solves #1, at the cost of having an extra
| remote.
|
| I mainly hit #2 when scrubbing, often (worse on some
| compression types than others), it'll just freeze frame
| for a minute before everything catches up. This may be
| because I'm serving the content via HTTP to the Vera V,
| I've been meaning to try NFS and/or SMB. Never had issues
| with playback itself, probably because the Vera V
| hardware and the OSMC/Kodi build are co-developed, so
| there is pretty much always hardware decode support.
|
| #3 surprised me; Kodi supporting just using my directory
| layout is why I use it over something like Jellyfin! I
| just added the HTTP share, and then navigate
| Videos->files->my_http_share_name and I'm in my directory
| structure.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I run Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 4. I have the same
| complaints about it that you have.
|
| And it is nice, I guess -- it's functionally simple to
| just play files over an SMB share. But the interface
| is... well, the interface was really amazing on the OG
| Xbox and that was a very long time ago.
|
| So even though I keep Kodi around, most of my video-
| watching is with Plex, wherein: The library updates
| itself. The subtitles download themselves (the subtitles
| even theoretically sync themselves to the video). Stuff
| generally Just Works, even over the WAN.
|
| Plex is very set-and-forget, and its performance is great
| on a ~$20 ONN streamer-box from Wal-Mart (and there's
| also smart TV apps and PC-oriented playback, of course).
|
| The user experience is really good: The interface is very
| remote-centric and flows well while kicked back in an
| easy chair in front of a TV. My eldery, tech-averse dad
| uses Plex without any trouble, which he'd absolutely
| never be able to do with Kodi.
|
| Amusingly, Plex is/was a fork XBMC. :)
|
| Despite the complexities of its client-server model
| (where both sides are kind of fat), and the expense, I
| can't recommend Plex highly enough.
|
| That said: Jellyfin is free both as in beer and as in
| libre. It also gets most of this stuff right, and from
| what I've read it's been improving steadily for a number
| of years. I'd have written about Jellyfin instead, but I
| don't have as much direct experience with it (and I paid
| for Plex a long time ago).
| echelon_musk wrote:
| 1. Buy a FLiRC and use any remote of your choosing.
|
| 2. Are you running Kodi on a potato?
|
| 3. You can absolutely use Kodi without a media database.
| hellotheretoday wrote:
| On #3 you can use jellyfin/plex/emby to manage your
| content and import it into kodi with plugins (jellyfin
| for kodi/plex for kodi/etc). This makes the media content
| portion of kodi MUCH easier as you now can centrally
| manage it through the superior jellyfin (or whatever) app
| which is better for administering metadata and utilize
| kodi which is better which is much better than most
| jellyfin client apps when you don't have to worry about
| managing content libraries.
|
| Especially so when you get a good skin and device that
| makes the whole thing worthwhile. My primary playback
| system is kodi + arctic zephyr reloaded but I haven't
| evaluated skins in awhile so maybe there's something new
| that's better. The hardware is a ugoos am6b+ flashed with
| coreelec which afaik is the only thing that can natively
| play all profiles of Dolby vision correctly which is
| great bc my primary tv is an lg oled. Having a jellyfin
| database as the backend means that all my new media just
| shows up when I start it up and I also have the option
| for jellyfin client apps on other devices in the home and
| remotely. It's the best option all around, though it does
| have headaches: ugoos locked the bootloader so hdmi cec
| doesn't work with power on very well (I just send a wake
| on Ethernet through home assistant when the tv and avr
| come on to circumvent this) and there are some other hdmi
| cec hiccups (it tends to "steal focus" during things like
| airplay)
| bombcar wrote:
| We got tons of people to use XMBC, even moms and similar.
|
| But Kodi, Kodi even I couldn't figure out, Jellyfin +
| Infuse is bog simple.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Which is funny because Kodi is XBMC.
|
| I have a similar issue and just don't get on with Kodi.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Part of the reason more people now understand how to use
| jellyfin etc is because they have been used to doing it
| with netflix and other apps etc for 10+ years
| phantasmish wrote:
| Sure, but I've figured out multiple Paradox game UIs, put
| many hours into a bunch of weird old crufty DOS games
| (Dominus, anyone? Darklands?), ran Gentoo as my main OS
| for several years (while preferring Windowmaker as my WM,
| for god's sake, hahaha)... and still got myself turned
| around in Kodi sometimes after many hours using it, in a
| way I never did in Netflix's UI (any of their UIs).
|
| Kodi's got some really weird UI choices going on. I don't
| think it's the case that Netflix-alike UIs are anywhere
| near equivalently bad, but people are able to use them
| anyway just due to familiarity. I think Kodi's is simply
| a lot worse.
|
| Even the parts of Jellyfin that don't resemble Netflix
| (as there's no user-facing equivalent in Netflix)--the
| server & library management portions--I find vastly
| easier to use than Kodi's equivalents.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You need to reach for their inner cheap skates.
| arjie wrote:
| That's probably because of how easy things are to get here
| in the US. My parents are in their late 60s and I was
| talking to my dad the other day when he told me about how
| they watch old movies on the ancient TV they have at home
| in India: RaspBMC.
|
| I found this astonishing since I set this up perhaps a
| decade ago on a RaspberryPI with a large external USB
| drive. I recall setting up something with Samba so that
| their Windows computer in the house could either make the
| stuff available or transfer it to the USB drive. Then I
| used one of those USB flirc setups so that they could use a
| remote to navigate the interface.
|
| And then I imaged a few SD cards and left them there for
| them to use.
|
| At some point, my parents figured out how to get torrented
| content down and how to use the OpenSubtitles.org
| integration to get subtitles. And that worked for a bit,
| but something must have changed because they tell me now
| that they have to download the subtitles on the computer
| and change the name to match or something.
|
| I suppose you need sufficient motivation. My parents seem
| to enjoy movies from a century ago which are hard to find
| in India but easy to find on the Internet. If they could
| just jump on Amazon Prime and fetch them perhaps they'd
| have jumped through fewer hoops.
|
| The thing that most amazes me is that this gambit with
| imaging SD cards worked! South India had a period in there
| where power would cut out frequently. This dodged that
| particular problem!
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| I started out using XMBC on the original XBOX. Eventually
| evolved it to Kodi and various HTPC setups when HD video
| became popular.
|
| These days I've settled on AppleTV 4K with Infuse. It's
| just so much more polished and reliable than anything else.
|
| While I appreciate what Kodi can do, it's UX is stuck in
| 2005. And decisions like how it handles the BACK button
| while playing is just so odd to me.
| lproven wrote:
| > I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the
| TV.
|
| Me too. It was a life-changing tool: take some cast-off free
| hardware and a bit of free software, using an exploit to an
| old game that cost me PS2 and a tool to put it on a memory
| card that cost me PS5 (both second-hand off eBay), I had a
| media player that could stream to my (free) TV.
|
| I spent many hundreds of hours watching it, and about 30 mins
| of playing games on the thing ever.
|
| I still have it but it's in a basement in another country.
| Now I want to see if it still works, and if I can upgrade it.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Same, and I count Kodi in the not good enough interfaces.
|
| Two things make it worse: The Xbox controllers were great for
| navigation vs a remote control.
|
| SMB1 was much easier to setup and use vs modern samba.
| torh wrote:
| Still have the original Xbox, working like a charm. Not sure
| which version of XBMC it has, but the internal disk is full
| of old series and movies.
|
| Still has a share on my computer mapped up, but the original
| Xbox can't keep up with the big files.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| abrookewood wrote:
| 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!
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| opello wrote:
| It was also a really nice MythTV frontend at some point which
| was easier to set up than additional home theater PCs that
| connected to the central PVR.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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 :)
| tclancy wrote:
| I felt the same about ReplayTV and integration with the PS2.
| The future is always unevenly distributed.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| 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!
| kotaKat wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] http://archiv.sega-
| dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...
| monocasa wrote:
| In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert
| and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox
| dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to
| me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.
| dylan604 wrote:
| People with the skills to design these things impress the
| hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand
| it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.
|
| Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using
| computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of
| System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from
| booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading
| extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font
| I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted
| that a font could crash a computer. The more things change,
| the more they stay the same it appears.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| That link just unlocked a core memory I haven't thought about
| since I was 17 years old, so thanks for that!
| nick_ wrote:
| Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this"
| but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from
| case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?
| echelon_musk wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox:XCAT
| xeromal wrote:
| I remember that there were 2 games that you could use to modify
| your xbox but I only remember 1 game. Mechassault.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Mechassault, 007 Agent Under Fire and Splinter Cell.
|
| More recently there are other game exploits, such as THPS4.
| However, since ENDGAME you don't even need a game to softmod.
| KyleJune wrote:
| I think I used splinter cell. The exploit was also only in
| a specific version of the game. I remember having to look
| at a version number on the cd when buying to confirm I was
| getting the right one.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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...
|
| > Not on exhibit to the public.
|
| =(
| mentos wrote:
| Same. Executer mod chip?
|
| 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
| joshstrange wrote:
| That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor
| (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I
| think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for
| unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip
| it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through
| whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then
| rinse and repeat.
|
| Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to
| get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it
| so I could do what you did.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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)
| par wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Jellyfin + Infuse on Apple TV has been quite wonderful.
| Jellyfin alone works fine if you have various other players.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Kodi works great with Jellyfin, too :)
| GaryBluto wrote:
| As much of an achievement as this is, I think much of the charm
| is sadly lost in later versions of XBMC.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| 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!
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting
| round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-
| XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| A quick search shows me that there is an actively
| maintained version here
| https://github.com/jamal2362/skin.pm3-hd.cpm
| unbehagen wrote:
| 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.
| AshleyGrant wrote:
| I used that to build my XM Radio Online plugin!
| jajuuka wrote:
| 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.
| wildzzz wrote:
| There are still new hardware upgrades and add-ons being
| developed for the original Xbox. I myself contributed heavily
| to a new HDMI upgrade.
| anonymousab wrote:
| 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.
| accrual wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| Those ancient 360s are probably doomed to hardware failure
| however. They didn't seem to fix the issues with the 360
| being essentially disposable until very late in the release
| cycle.
| caseyf7 wrote:
| I fondly remember opening up my Xbox to solder a mini board to
| the Xbox board. Later, they figured out how to add it without the
| additional board.
| kristofferR wrote:
| 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.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Gotta love this:
|
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| it's getting harder and harder to find an easy to install
| 32-bit linux distro, though
| urbandw311er wrote:
| 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.
| themafia wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| 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:
|
| - 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...
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Let me just hit up the bot on irc so i can get the one time ftp
| login to xbins and grab this.
| nirav72 wrote:
| 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.
| emilbratt wrote:
| 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".
|
| 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
| matthewpick wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://avalaunch.net/
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