A half day for the Easter holiday left me with some spare time. With that I planned to help my friend rebuild his PC back to a functional state by reloading his OS. During this process, and playing some Resident Evil 5 we decided to me up with my girlfriend and a few other of my friends and eat at Cheddars. This is were it got weird. In talks over dinner, we realized that all the media machine issues could be solved by hacking a simple Xbox to XBMC using softmod.
After dinner we found the Xbox in a closet box and search frantically for a power cable, but there was none to be had, however after further investigation we noticed that a Playstation Power Cable was very close and after a few adjustments with a knife we were in business. We rushed to my house to gather the controller, memory card, and game needed to preform the hack and raced back over with an additional Xbox I had for another experiment. It was a hackfest 2 Xboxs were converted into lean mean media playing machines. This inspired our friend rebuilding the PC and decided to purchase one on Craigslist yesterday, which we promptly hacked over burgers and wine. So my total comes to 4 Xboxes loaded with XBMC. I will soon do a write up of a quick process to get it done.
The only limitation we have discovered is with MKVs and high bitrate video files, it seems to lag out. But honestly, it is a 733mhz PIII with an good video card, so the limitations of very manageable. Especially now that you can enjoy all that media that you have spend hours downloading on your large TV in the living room and control it all with the DVD remote that the Xbox has, and you give new life to a game console that would have just collected dust otherwise. ~waynezim
