In beta since December of 2013, the XBMC4Xbox Project announced the release of version 3.5 of the application for the venerable original Microsoft Xbox, first seen way back in 2001. The hackable Microsoft console with its meager 64 MBs of RAM and now small seeming 8 GB hard disk has increasingly fallen off most people's radars as it was left behind by improvements in hardware, software and time. Even the original project which fostered it and had discontinued support for it in its forums has begun to move away from their humble beginnings with a name change from XBMC to Kodi. Fortunately for those of us who still think the combo of XBMC + Xbox makes for a 'Killer Media Center' there's still life in the old system!
Early Tuesday afternoon BuZz posted:
After more than a year’s work since v3.3, we are very pleased to announce XBMC4Xbox version v3.5. A large number of new features and improvements have been made since v3.3, including the integration of Python 2.7, improved video playback, updates to the skinning engine, scraper fixes, and plenty of bug fixes.
[...] Python support in XBMC4Xbox has been overhauled, with the out of date Python 2.4 replaced with Python 2.7. This update, along with the addition of some missing API functions brings much better compatibility with Kodi (Formerly XBMC) plugins. The Addons4Xbox installer has also been updated, allowing many plugins written for Kodi to work right out of the box. The Python 2.7 update also brings performance improvements, and comes with fully working libraries for sqlite3, and SSL amongst others.
[...] There have been many bug fixes around the software with around 44 issues on the bugtracker resolved/fixed as well as more reported via the forum. Thanks to all those that have reported bugs, provided fixes & patches, and helped with testing.
For the full announcement see the blog post here.
As someone who just recently took the plunge and picked up an old Xbox to play around with this news couldn't have come at a better time. Downloads can be found in the usual spots.
(Score: 2) by nyder on Friday October 17 2014, @09:44AM
While giving props to the peeps, I'm running Kodi on my Amazon Fire TV. The AFTV cost my $84 (on sale), and I have rooted it, installed Kodi, and am loving it.
Handles 1080p vids great, runs emulators better then the Xbox, plus I can also use the latest Android apps on it. Can I watch the WWE Network on the Xbox? No, but I can on my AFTV.
Not to mention it's like 4"x4"x1"
So ya, it's nice you are keeping the old crappy stuff up to date, but TV has changed a lot since the Xbox days and it's seriously underpowered for what it needs to do if it wants to keep up.
Still, I'm sure the 10 peeps who still use the Xbox for XBMC will be happy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @10:51AM
Make sure you use a condom.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday October 17 2014, @01:20PM
And if you need a media tank with more oomph, even the ability to play older games like HL2 and L4D while sipping power just pick up an AMD quad mini kit for $250 [newegg.com] and slap OpenELEC or SteamOS or Windows 8 (the only place Metro works really well IMHO is as a 10 foot UI) and call it a day. or if you want dirt cheap there is always the last gen AMD E350 for $120> and get to enjoy the huge X86 software library. [newegg.com]
While I have only recently started building Jaguar chip units so I haven't had much of a chance to really get in depth with it I have built plenty of the E350s and they make great media tanks, combine with mediaPortal and you have a whisper quiet system that sips power while having a nicely powerful GPU that has acceleration for pretty much all the major video formats. Don't get me wrong, the Xbox was a good system back in the day, but I have literally thrown away more powerful systems than what the original Xbox is packing! Not to mention while you can get 1080p on a Bobcat or jaguar the weak celery just can't handle it and you certainly can't offload to the Geforce onboard the Xbox.
At the end of the day unless you are just giving it away to somebody too poor to get anything better XBMC on the original Xbox is just too weak.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 17 2014, @05:25PM
Yup. I'd even say $85 is a bit much, you can certainly find cheaper options. Got my parents a Roku for $50 and they're loving that, and I imagine it too is pretty superior to XBMC.
I actually bought an old X-Box a couple years ago intending to use it for XBMC. Found it at a local thrift store for $8, figured what the hell, might as well buy it. But then you've gotta buy controllers and adapters and storage...I ended up building my own system with a Raspberry Pi. You can run XBMC on one of those as well, though I opt for omxplayer controlled by some PHP scripts as that seems to have better codec support and doesn't tax the system so much. $35 for the board, maybe $20 for an SD card, probably almost $100 for a 2TB hard drive but that would be needed no matter what you use. In the end it was cheaper than buying all the crap I'd need for the X-Box, with the added bonus that I was able to hack it in to control the stereo and projector directly. Can't do Netflix, but I built my own using TasteKid and Pirate Bay. Even had it set up to run a news show, downloaded nightly from YouTube, right as I got home from work every day. That feature didn't quite make it into the latest software version though... :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @12:10PM
Ive been a long time user of xbmc now kodi... and never heard of this fork... nor I could find on his page why it exists...
Did the original xmbc lost the ability to get installed in xbox? did they refuse to merge the changes?
Can you link to those discussions? why I cant not find easily it (if at all) in the xbcm4xbox page?
Thanks
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday October 17 2014, @01:30PM
One of the sources [xbmc.org] from the XBMC Wikipedia page.
There was a lack of interest by the XBMC team at large, so one team member took the existing code base and started maintaining it solely for XBOX.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @03:13PM
XBMC no longer releases for original xbox. they stopped releasing a version of xbmc that would run on the original xbox at least 2 years ago. Old versions still work on original xbox.
the original xbox with xbmc was a great htpc back in the day. i used it until about 2 years ago. there are two reason i stopped using it:
1. i finally upgraded my main TV from a 32" CRT to a 40" LCD TV. original xbox looks like crap on LCD unless you get a component output cable. even then, it's just barely decent.
2. most of the video 'releases' on the net shifted from divx/xvid to x264. xbox (running old versions of xbmc) can't handle x264 (mp4s, mkvs, etc.) it will play them but the video gets very jumpy after a few minutes and the audio becomes un-synced.
that said, if the latest xbmc4xbox release has corrected #2, it would still be a nice htpc for a 'cabin in the woods' environment with no internet.