Monday, March 06, 2006

New toy: XBOX

The lack of responsiveness from my Showcenter remote control, and the general '80s look of the GUI, together with the constant "XMBC does this" "XMBC does that" chat on ukha_d have prompted me to take the plunge and buy an XBOX. £65 delivered from amazon marketplace, with a controller, and a DVD Remote kit - not bad.

Anyhoo, it arrived today, so I spent the evening (or part of it) setting it up. For no good reason, other than 'just because' I decided to softmod it, rather than bothering with a chip. Now, I have never done anything like this before, and I have to say the documentation is the poorest and most disparate I have ever seen.

I followed the manual at : http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=443489 which sets it all out in a fairly sensible way. Except it didn't work. The bit where you have to hot swap the drive didnt work, it stayed locked for me. But a quick google showed an alternative - rip a track from a CD to the Hard Drive, and begin playing it. Pause playback, and then swap the drive. Apparently works 100% of the time.

With that completed I now had EvoX dashboard installed on my XBOX. Installing XBMC was simply a matter of copying (FTP) across the files from the distro - I followed the second part of the instructions from here to do that part.

Pictures and music 100%. Video not working. Very disappointing. Posting to ukha_d for advice....

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