What To Do With a Free Xbox 360 Pro? 416
OzPeter writes "Last week I won an Xbox 360 Pro. However, I am not a gamer, and after looking at the current MS offerings, I am not tempted to become one. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC that I can use for streaming TV shows off the 'net as well as general web browsing and displaying video through the HDMI port. With that in mind, I again looked at MS and saw they seemed to have positioned the Xbox as an adjunct to a separate Windows Media Center PC and not as a stand alone unit (which is not what I want). So, once again, I did some more research into the Xbox homebrew scene and discovered things like Xbox Linux. But after reading that site, it is apparent that MS is trying to beat down the homebrewers, and I am left wondering how much hassle it would be to go down that path. So my question is: how should I re-purpose my Xbox? Is it worthwhile doing the Homebrew/Linux option (and can anyone share any experiences)? Are there other ways of re-purposing the device that I haven't considered? Or should I just keep it boxed up as a Christmas present for a favorite nephew?"
Sell it (Score:5, Informative)
Its worth less to you than somebody who would use it for gaming.
Re:Why bother? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:XBMC = Xbox Media Center (Score:5, Informative)
XBMC was originally made for hacked classic Xboxes. It doesn't run on the Xbox 360. While it was great at the time, the old Xbox didn't support HD output which limits it's use these days.
XBMC has however been ported to run on Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating systems and does support HD output on these systems. This makes for a pretty good home theater PC setup and is more flexible than the built in stuff on Xbox 360.
Re:XBMC = Xbox Media Center (Score:3, Informative)
That's for Xbox1 (and now Win/Mac/Linux), not the 360. The Xbox1 does make a great media center, but although some HD capability is claimed, it's damn near useless for anything above 480p. There are also legal issues with XBMC on an Xbox1 running natively (the native/original port is compiled with the Xbox SDK and therefore distributing or having binaries is copyright infringement). Running Linux on an Xbox1 is also pretty tight because it only has 64MB of RAM. I upgraded mine to 128MB and managed to get the MythTV frontend working very well, though.
Re:I say... (Score:2, Informative)
I'll second this. Look, maybe it's not as sexy as having a Linux based media hub or something, but I've been using my XBox 360 as an extender for a Vista MediaCenter PC and it works great. There's a ton of great games for it, and it still spends many hours a day acting as the prime interface for our living room media needs.
It's the Media Center Extender for a media PC [Vista] with Dual HDTV OTA tuners, I can stream Netflix directly [with XBox Live Gold], I can stream my XVID+AC3 movies with full surround from the media PC [using Media Player sharing]. If you really don't want to mess with a back-end media center PC, you can also just copy your XVID/DIVX/H.264 movies to a USB hard drive, and play them directly. I can play DVD and HD-DVDs. That's what's available natively.
On top of that, by paying $30 [one-time] for PlayON to run on the media center PC, I can browse and watch Hulu and Youtube and various other video sites [or Netflix if you don't want to pay for XBOX Live].
And if you do use a back-end media PC, I'm pretty sure you can use multiple XBox360s as front-ends to different rooms.
The only thing it can't do is play BluRay.
The PS3 can do most of that as well, plus play BluRay. It'll still need a back-end PC to do Hulu/Netflix and such. I'm not sure what the PS3's capabilities are with regards to acting as an extender for a back-end Tuner/DVR solution [maybe a MythTV front end? I dunno].
So it boils down to if you don't already have a BR player, and if you want to deal with selling the XBox, and paying the difference to get a PS3.
Re:If you've got a big screen, sell it and get a P (Score:3, Informative)
Why is a PS3 better at streaming to a large screen than an Xbox? Oh right, it's not. XBox will be doing instant-start 1080p streaming soon, and does HD Netflix now...unlike the PS3. The PS3 is quieter, and obviously the blu-ray is good if you want to play discs, but I'd pick the 360 for streaming. Well actually I use Tivos, more family-friendly interface.
Could be worse. You could have won a game. (Score:3, Informative)
I went over to EA for a technical talk once and "won" a raffle for a copy of EA Golf for the XBox 360. (It was more like "second prize is two copies of EA Golf".)
Re:Penny Arcade Charity (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sell it (Score:4, Informative)
The 360 can do some video streaming from XP computers with media player 11 or Vista boxes but it's a pain in the butt. There's products like tversity that can do transcoding but it's so much more hassle than it's worth it's not even funny.
What?! Streaming video files from your PC to your 360 is dead easy. Is the format DivX/XviD (most files)? Plays with no modification right from the dashboard. If not, set up the media center (can be a bit of a pain, but hardly the epic pain in the ass you claim), install Transcode 360 on your PC, select file, select the Transcode option, done.
If that's considered hard (where the majority of files play seamlessly, and the rest require only slightly more work), I want to know what the heck easy is. That must be something like "the device picks which files to play for me, and plays them without my intervention".
No IRS exceptions for prizes. (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, any prize must be claimed. See Publication 525 [irs.gov], page 34. The example given is a $50 prize.
Report on form 1040, line 21.
Re:Sell it (Score:3, Informative)
I agree. Streaming network content to the xbox 360 is the easiest media centre I have ever had the pleasure to work with. I also happen to be one of the lucky ones who has bought 2 xbox 360s and never had either of them RROD in 2.5 years.
While the media centre offerings on XP can be a hassle to set up - Vista is only slightly less time consuming - the Win 7 setup is by far the easiest and fastest, even compared with 3rd party options like TVersity. With the appropriate codecs installed, simply add the folder to the Videos libraries and in Media Player click "Stream -> More streaming options...". Give permission for the 360 to access your PCs media library, wait for Media Player to index the files, then navigate to the video library on the 360. A list of network devices with media streaming capabilities will appear after a few seconds and simply follow the folder structure to access the file you want to watch.
While it doesn't allow you to stream internet media, the Netflix service is available for U.S. residents. TVersity will also allow you to subscribe to internet video feeds if local network content is not enough. I am using my desktop PC and a WD My Book World NAS (which natively supports media streaming via PVConnect [TwonkyMedia] and automatically shows up under the xbox video library device list) to download and feed all my music and video, respectively. Any sufficient network should be able to support all types of media, even using the xbox wireless adapter (802.11g) has enough bandwidth to stream 720p HDTV x264 content without waiting to buffer.
For my needs, this setup fits perfectly. Obviously OzPeter has a much narrow focus for what he wants to do but if others have similar requirements as myself then I can't recommend this enough. I never thought we would see the day when a Microsoft product would "just work" but kudos to them for coming this far.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Informative)
The original Xbox remains, once modded, one of the best HTPCs you can get.
No it doesn't.
It lacks the horsepower to handle HD content.
XBMC was great, but it's limited by the hardware, and the 360 has thus far not seen a true successor to it.
Re:Why bother? (Score:1, Informative)
You can use the xbox in HD in europe. I live in France, i bought the cable from a german reseller on ebay (around 10 euros) and i got the composite cable. XBMC looks great, iÂve the menus at a resolution 720, and when i watch a film it upscales it to 1080.
That cable is worth it, specially if you already have a modded xbox
Re:Take 2 machine to watch one video? (Score:3, Informative)
Assuming the Xbox firmware is up to date, it does play divx files from a USB hard drive.
Re:Why bother? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
All three major consoles charge to develop.
The Nintendo Wii development kit is $1,700.
The Sony PS3 development kit is $2,000 (non-Linux)
The XBox 360 development kit....$100
Depending on the price that the game ends up costing ($5, $3, or $1), given the millions of gamers who are on the marketplace, an indie game studio could somewhat easily recoup that year's losses($100) from having Microsoft host their game by selling anywhere between 20 and 100 copies of their game. If the game is good, they should have little problem. If it stinks, they may have more problems. If no one is buying the game, they will eventually take it off, freeing up the marketplace for others to try selling their games, which may or may not be good.
You're flatly wrong.
The Xbox 360 development kit is absolutely not $100. You can get a one-year membership to the XNA Creators Club, which allows you to submit games to the Xbox Indie Games service, for $99 USD. The actual development kit associated with this service is free, but you need to pay a $99 fee to actually use the publication channels for a year.
This is NOT a commercial development kit.
Moreover, as it relates to "commercial potential", Xbox Indie Games have been repeatedly grumbled about by prominent authors. The absolute upper cap for the single highest profile Indie Game is 10,000 unit sales. Developers in the price categories that even have a shot at that order of magnitude of sales are taking anywhere from 70 cents to 2.10 for their games. For commercial game production, Xbox Indie Games will NOT be profitable.
Actual commercial Xbox 360 development kits, used to develop Xbox Live Arcade games and Xbox 360 games, cost substantially more.
All of this information is available in a ten second Google tour of the subject. Why was parent modded +5?