And so for Christmas, a new catagory for the site – Xbox Modding. In the last week, Game Stores in the UK have been selling pre-owned Xboxes (black brick Xbox 1s, not Xbox 360s!) for £19.95. A bargain if you ask me! A few years ago, when I got my Xbox 360, I decided to breath some life back into my old Xbox by modifying it to run unsigned code. Usually, Xboxes are locked down my Microsoft to only play DVDs that have signed (i.e. authorised) software. However, if you mod an Xbox you can override this, and run some of the many fantastic pieces of homebrew and open-source software available for download. As all of this software has been compiled using the Microsoft Development Kit, whilst what it does is legal, the compilation and distribution of aformentioned software is of dubious legality. Therefore, it is not easy to get hold of straight off the bat. However, all fo the software I mention is freely available somewhere (Google is your friend!). As many people know, this mod can also be used to overcome the copy protection on games, but that is NOT the reason why I did it, and don’t condone its use in that way. The mod itself can be done with a chip for about a tenner, or can be done in multiple ways by ‘softmodding’ the Xbox using one of several exploits.

The software I’m talking about specifically in this case Xbox Media Center (note crazy American spelling! ). From here on (and in most other places), It’ll be referred to as XBMC. In a nutshell, XBMC is a brilliant piece of media player software that allows you to play more or less anything from virtually any source on the TV attached to your Xbox. All you need is a modded Xbox, the XBMC software, and, ideally, a network.

XBMC looks something like this when running (with the default skin) – Click for Bigness…

The logo has changed since this shot was taken to something more like the one at the top of this article.  That’s an RSS feed you can see scrolling its way across the bottom of the screen.  As you can see, by default the whole thing looks 10 times better than Microsoft’s botch-job Xbox 360 interface. You can actually get a skin which makes it look like a 360 – why the heck you’d ever want to do that is beyond me, but hey – to each their own eh? You can also make it look like a AppleTV (or the new MacOS Front Row) Interface too. Like I said, I still much prefer the default one though.

You can play virtually any format on this thing, as long as it’s not HD. Unfortuantely, even though the Xbox can produce HD images for the interface of XBMC, it doesn’t have enough CPU power and RAM to process true (720p upwards) video. That’s the ONLY thing that the 360 has over it at the moment. I am, however, lucky enough to have both, so I just subject myself to the 360s interface if I need to watch HD content (which to be honest, is rarely at the moment – 90% of the stuff I watch is up to about 540 lines – 1/2 the res of 1080p).

It can play these files in virtually any way too – you can set up SMB shares from a Mac/PC, replace the HDD in the Xbox with a bigger one and transfer the files to that, or even burn them to DVD and play from there…! I take the network route, and have any files I need to share in a shared folder on my Mac. It does mean that I need to have the Mac switched on when I want to watch anything, but that’s no problem, as I just use a small script on XBMC to wake the Mac up from sleep if required. Ain’t technology wonderful!

It can also do an assortment of other things. It can display images from the same sources. These look wonderful on a 720p or 1080i screen. It can also play shared music in virtually any format. It’s flexibility is further extended with the use of scripts which do many things from playing content on streaming media sites (e.g. BBC radio, YouTube etc) to being able to check your email or even automate your home!!

There’s no point in me going over how it’s done here, as there are LOTS of tutorials as to how to set it up (try www.xboxscene.com for a start). I have the whole thing set up on two seperate boxes – one on my bedroom, on a 480p projector, and another in the living room, on an HD 42″ plasma.

All-in-all, its a brilliant, and these days, cheap system. If you go for it, you won’t look back!