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posted by martyb on Friday October 17 2014, @07:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-dead-yet dept.

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 Python support in XBMC4Xbox has been overhauled, with the out of date Python 2.4 replaced with Python 2.7.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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday October 17 2014, @01:20PM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday October 17 2014, @01:20PM (#106990) Journal

    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.

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