XBMC is CLUTCH

Last week I hacked an Xbox with the help of my friend John. It’s actually funny because several weeks earlier I had given John my old Xbox because he wanted to try and hack it and, well, I had no use for the damn thing (which was collecting dust in the basement) so I just gave it to him. Then when I saw how FUCKING AWESOME it was after his beat-down I decided I had to do the same so I bought an old Xbox from my friend Devin for $40 (which I still owe him) and tried it myself.

Screenshots

Pain and Suffering

Let me just say straight out that modding an Xbox is a really long and involved process and definitely not for the faint-of-heart. It took me three days total and involved taking apart lots of hardware, running lots of really sketchy software and crossing lots of fingers (oh and pulling lots of hair when things blew up). BUT! In the end I ended up with the coolest gadget EVAR. It is currently the most used device in our house.

I wouldn’t even try to include all of the steps here to do this yourself. There are numerous websites out there with all sorts of information on the subject. I decided to go the soft-mod route instead of actually replacing any chips in my Xbox. The primary reason for this was impatience. I just didn’t want to wait a couple of weeks for a mod chip. Of course if I had actually swapped out the chip it would have been a whole lot easier but what’s done is done. STOP JUDGING ME!

Not only did I do all the soft mod stuff but I also went through the rather interesting process of upgrading the hard drive in the Xbox. The original Xbox shipped with an 8gig HD which is enough to store lots of saved game files but not much else. Fortunately there is a hack to upgrade that shit, which I did. That alone was a several hour process involving taking apart a PC to set it up for imaging the new drive.

All in all it was a painful process but the end result is amazing. This is by far the coolest media center I have played with. It supports most everything right out of the box. It can talk to shares of any kind on your network to discover media (including finding iTunes shares), it will play every conceivable media type, you can trick it out with all kinds of plugins and scripts and, well, it’s just awesome. Oh and it also supports 1080i so all of this stuff is in breathtaking resolution. I had to scale those sample images above down from 1920×1080 to 800×450 to fit them on the site.

Screw $300 for an Apple TV. This baby does it all and cost me < $100. And it’s cool. The chicks dig it. srsly.

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