XBox Media Centre

Mon, 07/08/2006 - 20:34 — David Goodwin

Last night, D showed me XBox media centre, which looks really impressive - it has really nice graphics, performs well, allows you to play any media you want - with great special effects and eye candy. Kat and I have been trying for ages to find a cheap, low cost device which can play movies, music etc from our Linux file server, to the TV with no hassle involved.

The problem I have is, :

It's a Microsoft XBox. Where's the non-proprietary alternative?
I don't really want to buy a closed system that needs chipping to be useful
It would need a new hard disk etc etc to be useful (this is cheap, just a nusiance to do).
I would also like something with a tv tuner built in, so once we move I only need one box under the TV.

I know from looking in the past, that there really isn't a Linux based equivalent - MythTV has a reputation for being a bitch to install and doesn't have the same feature set (afaik). The XBox media centre is at least an open source project (although it's based on a proprietary platform).

What's quite surprising is how well the xbox performs - especially considering how low powered it is - (p3 700 celeron, with 64 mb of ram).

So, all things considered - I'm not going to spend X hundred quid on a pre-built MythTV based thing; yet I want the functionality - so I may as well buy a second hand xbox.

D mentioned there is a MythTV frontend that works under the xbox media centre - which looks like it will provide a solution to the TV problem - allowing me to add in a MythTV box at a later date.

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Mon, 07/08/2006 - 22:32 — Paul Cooper (not verified)

Linux Media Centre

OK, it's not even beta yet but Elisa looks promising

http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/

it's a beautiful interface, although it could still be improved, it's supported by a company so you know that in some form it will probably have legal support for most stuff want / need, e.g. DVD, mp3, etc, and two dedicated developers, and hopefully a growing community (that remains to be seen, but other fluendo stuff seems to have taken hold).

Doesn't help you get a media centre today though.

Paul

Mon, 09/07/2007 - 03:11 — Juski (not verified)

Hmmm great, closed-source paid-for plugins...

Sure it's got a spiffy UI, but it can't play anything like DVD or mp3 without paid-for closed-source plugins. We don't (yet) have software patents in Europe so the prospect of having to *pay* to get what other apps already do for FREE seems silly to me.

Tue, 08/08/2006 - 08:02 — Schwuk (not verified)

XBMC is seriously cool, and

XBMC is seriously cool, and it's the reason I still own an Xbox (that and MAMEoX), however I'm now starting to look into alternatives. Development seems to be slowing down on a lot of the Xbox projects, and getting binaries involves jumping through hoops. Getting the source is easier, but getting the SDK to use the source is as hard as getting the binaries in the first place.

At LRL'06 the MythTV people had a frontend running on a T-Mobile set-top box. For the life of me I can't remember what it was, but they got it for ~£30 off eBay.

Tue, 08/08/2006 - 19:30 — Juski (not verified)

T-Online S100

I did indeed have a set-top box thingy with me at LRL - basically a PC in a STB form factor. They can be had for about £30 ish from Ebay from German sellers.

A little bit of work (sort of) detailed on my website is necessary, but I'll be selling off a spare machine pre-modded soon :)

I have an image containing Slackware Linux (codenamed Zenslack) and XMMS, as well as one for MythTV. The XMMS image should fit on a 128MB USB flash stick - the MythTV one takes up most of a 512MB stick.

Wed, 09/08/2006 - 08:18 — D (not verified)

Badger! :-(

I forgot to show you the MAME and Amiga Emulator stuff!

Next time; and I think I'll not have popadoms. ;)

David and Katherine Goodwin

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