After many hours during the holiday break I successfully got my XBOX chipped, flashed the BIOS, upgraded the HD to 70 GB and installed the latest build of XBMC, or XBOX Media Center.

Release…….: XBox Media Center 1.1.0
Skin………….: Project Mayhem III

Not the easiest of tasks without any real, straightforward instructions, most of the stuff I found was written for experienced “modders”, or found in forums, but once I got it working it was totally worth it.

Having my XBOX networked, the media center gives me access to all of the videos, music, and photos stored on my regular computer from my TV in my living room. Once I realized how smooth the video streaming worked, I swapped the 300GB drive I initially bought for the XBOX, with the 70GB storage drive in my computer. The only reason for a larger hard drive in the XBOX, from the original 6-8 GB drive, is the ability to backup my XBOX games. As far as I know, the games can’t be streamed from another computer, but I could be wrong.

I have a few DVD’s backed up on my computer using DVD Shrink 3.2, which compresses them down to a specified size with minimal quality loss. At least that’s what I thought, until I watch Finding Nemo, compressed at 70%, on my TV. The video looked like a very over compressed JPG. Uncompressed Finding Nemo would be near 8 GB, and at that size, even with a 300 GB drive, isn’t feasible for permanent storage. Bring on bigger hard drives.

Best of all, there are emulators for all the old gaming systems, specifically, NES, Super Nintendo, and Nintendo 64. I still own all those systems, in a box in the basement, but now I’m jamming Mario Brothers, Mega Man, and Street Fighter on my XBOX.

With access to all my music in iTunes, I can get a playlist going in seconds, then navigate my photos in a sort of interactive slideshow with music. So awesome.

There are many plugin scripts for the system available, lots to stream video content from the web, a couple of my favorites are the Apple movie trailers, which works flawlessly and CNN Videos, which is like a video on demand of all the latest news headlines.

I don’t have much experience using other media center systems, but the XBMC is really quite solid, not to mention a beautiful designed interface (Project Mayhem III, not the XBMC default). The controls have a big learning curve since the media center makes use of every button on the XBOX controller, but once you get it they’re awesome. All this good stuff on my old XBOX that I hadn’t plugged in for about 4 months and it’s totally free.

The above screenshot is the main menu with the Scripts list open while playing some Death Cab tunes.