XBMC

[Podie]

Just curious if anyone else has got an (original) X-Box running http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/' target='_blank'>XBMC…?

I chipped mine about 18 months ago, after it had been languishing in a cupboard for a while, so it’s now sporting a 300GB HDD and sat on the network. Some minor tinkering last night saw the creation of shortcuts to stream the MP3s from the hard disk in the main PC, and connect to the photo galleries as well.

Just wondered if anyone had any tips or tricks they wanted to share…?

Next on the list for me is the Last.FM thing…

[spike4real]

i used to use it as a media center last year. Extremely useful when streaming videos across the network. Due to the development of HD, i replace it with a Windows Media Center box.

Still HIGHLY rate XBMC.
(Esspecially if you have one lying around not being used for games.)

[scorp]

Ive been using it for years, its the best. One tip: If your using wifi, like me, and you want to stream dvd content, you need to disable WEP/WPA otherwise the connection won't be fast enough (This is for 811.2g).

There are a few fatal flaws with xbmc though, but on the whole its very good.

I did make a script in linux to automatically generate thumbnails from a directory of movies (used ffmpeg), im sure a similiar thing could be done for windows.

Edited by scorp on Wednesday 3rd October 10:15

[Podie]

scorp said:

Ive been using it for years, its the best. One tip: If your using wifi, like me, and you want to stream dvd content, you need to disable WEP/WPA otherwise the connection won't be fast enough (This is for 811.2g).

Assume to mean 802.11g...?

Heard that might be an issue for DVD streaming, but guess if you want security you just hide the SSID and use MAC address control

We’re mainly using it for streaming MP3’s to be honest (saves buying a squeezebox!). We have about 200GB of music, so it takes its time to gather the info over the network, so perhaps dropping WPA is an idea. Found that by increasing the cache from 256kb to 1024kb for streaming solves the problem too.

Ended up sat there nosing through YouTube as well… although the lack of a portable keyboard can make entering info somewhat painful…

[Podie]

scorp said:

There are a few fatal flaws with xbmc though, but on the whole its very good.

[scorp]

Podie said:

scorp said:

There are a few fatal flaws with xbmc though, but on the whole its very good.

Mostly stability related, like cancelling media (whilst it sets up streaming) causes it to hang for about 10 minutes (stuck in 'cancelling').. Several of the xbmc scripts can cause hangs too. There are rare and seemingly random freezes aswell, which needs a reboot to remedy.

Edited by scorp on Wednesday 3rd October 10:25

[scorp]

Podie said:

Ended up sat there nosing through YouTube as well… although the lack of a portable keyboard can make entering info somewhat painful…

Oh yeah, forgot about this cool option, xbmc has a html server! - log into your xbox using a browser, and you can control the player from a pc (or in theory, any browser device, like a handle held pda/mobilephone)

Edited by scorp on Wednesday 3rd October 10:27

[Podie]

scorp said:

Podie said:

scorp said:

There are a few fatal flaws with xbmc though, but on the whole its very good.

Mostly stability related, like cancelling media (whilst it sets up streaming) causes it to hang for about 10 minutes (stuck in 'cancelling').. Several of the xbmc scripts can cause hangs too. There are rare and seemingly random freezes aswell, which needs a reboot to remedy.

Edited by scorp on Wednesday 3rd October 10:25

Ah, had one of those last night actually once I’d set up the SMB share. The MP3s were showing in size (MB) rather than minutes for the song… that’s when I increased the streaming cache for music from 256kb to 1024kb. Did a restart and didn’t get it again.

[Podie]

scorp said:

Podie said:

Ended up sat there nosing through YouTube as well… although the lack of a portable keyboard can make entering info somewhat painful…

Oh yeah, forgot about this cool option, xbmc has a html server! - log into your xbox using a browser, and you can control the player from a pc (or in theory, any browser device, like a handle held pda/mobilephone)

Edited by scorp on Wednesday 3rd October 10:27

Knew it had an HTML end, but not tried it… couldn’t work out why I’d want to use it… but see it now!

Not braved the PDA thing yet either… wonder if my SPV M3100 could you it…

[sjg]

I've got two and have converted a few for friends. With the "softmod" there's no need to even open the box.

Has anything changed in the last year that would be worth my while updating to?

[Podie]

sjg said:

I've got two and have converted a few for friends. With the "softmod" there's no need to even open the box.

Has anything changed in the last year that would be worth my while updating to?

RealMedia support, YouTube functionality, and some other bits…. Had a quick look, but couldn’t find the release notes...


Edit – looks like a greater number of file formats supported in both Audio and Video

Edited by Podie on Wednesday 3rd October 11:21

[Skittle]

If you have downloaded any films or tv series you can set it up so if will look up the film information or episode information for you.

All you need to do is point the source to files on your pc hard disk (like you did for your music) adn then set the content for the folder. For movies pick IMDB and for tv shows pick TV.com

Then whenever you want to see a film you can look at the summary - really useful when people have not heard of a film.

It can also pick up the track listings and album covers for your music tracks

Plenty of info on here

http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?titl...

[Podie]

Skittle said:

It can also pick up the track listings and album covers for your music tracks

Yep, seems to do that automatically for some reason!

Read the online manual, but I was just curious if anyone had any tips or tricks that weren't included.

[Skittle]

Dont know what version of XBMC your running but but if its an old one upgrade it.

I have not tried this myself but it looks interesting - a script on the xbox itself which will upgrade XBMC rather then FTPing a new version on.

Also make sure you back up all your customisations etc otherwise they get lost when you upgrade your XBMC version - I found this out too late the first time I upgraded and had to go and spend a lot of time putting it back together again.

details are here

http://lifehacker.com/software/weekend-project/sou...

[Podie]

Think I'm running 2.0.1... will nose at the link later, cheers.

[qube_TA]

Been running it for years, awesome bit of software.

They bring new ones out all the time it's worth upgrading as they're always fixing/improving things.

Also it's worth visiting http://www.xbmcscripts.com/ to get the latest scripts to access multimedia streams etc.

In addition I'd buy a component cable (about £5 on Ebay) as you can then run it in 1080i resolution which looks pretty sweet.

I love it, the only downside is that the machine isn't quick enough to play any HD content but it upscales SD stuff very well.

They're porting XBMC to Linux which means you'll be able to run it on a PC or a PS3 (running Linux) which will have enough horses for HD content.

[Podie]

Ah, useful linky... thanks

[GregE240]

Podie said:

scorp said:

Podie said:

Ended up sat there nosing through YouTube as well… although the lack of a portable keyboard can make entering info somewhat painful…

Oh yeah, forgot about this cool option, xbmc has a html server! - log into your xbox using a browser, and you can control the player from a pc (or in theory, any browser device, like a handle held pda/mobilephone)

Edited by scorp on Wednesday 3rd October 10:27

Knew it had an HTML end, but not tried it… couldn’t work out why I’d want to use it… but see it now!

Not braved the PDA thing yet either… wonder if my SPV M3100 could you it…

Cool! And there he was bitching about the lack of a keyboard....

[Podie]

GregE240 said:

Cool! And there he was bitching about the lack of a keyboard....

Stoopid long filepaths...

[scorp]

qube_TA said:

They're porting XBMC to Linux which means you'll be able to run it on a PC or a PS3 (running Linux) which will have enough horses for HD content.

Last time i tried ps3 linux, it ran like a p200. Don't sony hide the graphics processor and most of the SPE's in linux ? Might be more improved these days, but the initial release could barely handle rendering a few windows.