ldopa.net

This weekend I finally got around to soft-modding my original Xbox to run the XBox Media Center media player. I used:

• a borrowed copy of MechAssault
• a 32 MB USB memory stick
• a USB to XBox cable
• Action Replay software
• the excellent how-to listed here

…and while it’s touted as a 30-minute how-to, it really took more like two hours. But the end result was well worth it; it’s an incredibly slick, well designed piece of software. I can playback music, pictures and video right from the Xbox hard drive, or even better, I can stream it off of any machine in the house — you edit the menus via XML. There’s even a Mac OS X remote control widget. I’m really stunned that no one has put out this kind of box as a product — network attached storage with video-out and a remote. Throw a torrent client on the box and you’ve got the full “solution”. Cough.

Google Video has a nifty “Tech Talk” by Micheal Steil, one of the XBox Linux developers whose low-level hacking work has made this possible. It’s a fascinating look at the game of cat and mouse the hacker community has played with Microsoft for the past three years in order to get all this stuff working.

~Jeff