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Xbox Media Player Contest
mliu writes "Xbox Media Player, the GPL application that turns everyone's favorite hackable console (the Xbox) into a set-top-Divx/Xvid-playing-
Shoutcast-radio-streaming-
lean-mean-Mp3/Ogg-music-playing-all-while- sporting-a-pretty-user-interface-machine is holding a contest. They're in desperate need of help in terms of more developers and are holding a giveaway of 25 top of the line X2 Pro modchips for the 25 best patch submissions between now and March 31. If you don't know what Xbox Media Player is and/or feel the need to ask why bother hacking the Xbox, you have definitely gotta check it out. It turns the Xbox from Bill Gates' insidious plot to get into the living room into a set top box that can play practically everything even while sporting a sleek black look that won't stick out in your home theater system, and a user interface that your grandmother could use. And you can even run Linux on it in your spare time. It's no $100,000 but it's for a cause that is both more practical and useful if you ask me." The X-Box has proven itself an entertaining platform for hackers, and the XBMP is really excellent.
When it has visualization plug-ins, I think it'll be a great way to put MP3s in your stereo.
The XBox would be a nice media player, yes, but wouldn't this sort of take sales away from MS Media Center machines?
Conglom-O: We Own You (TM).
Its a real shame that there isn't a team developing cool stuff like this for the Playstation 2 Linux.
It seems as if mictosoft made a good move with the xbox. It seems to attract a great deal of the people that don't want to use windows. But for some reason a restricted computer by microsoft sounds good to the same people here. What's the catch here, could someone tell me?
Microsoft would be doing themselves a favor if they would release a downloadable dashboard update over live that adds support for VCD's and other Media functions. Official support always seems to work out better than community support.
Personally, I'd rather stick to my guns and go ahead with a Linux jewkbox than to give in to the massive Microsoft histerea surrounding there X-BOX gaming system.
Why would we line the pockets of MSs's corporate bottom dollar when we could simply utilize the foundation of Linux upon traditional X-86 hardware components like soundcards and high-speed motherboards??
The answer is also the question, and the question in this case is LINUX.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
If you want a low-cost system for playing music and videos, get yourself a Mini-ITX system; they start at around $200. For gaming, pay a little bit more and get yourself a real PC with a high-end graphics card.
So mod your second xbox. :)
Actually, we're just happy to have someone donate something so that we can have a contest.
See here for a post in the dicussion. I haven't kept up with more (such as if they have fullfilled the terms of the gpl by releaseing source).
Last time I looked, I got the impression you could only compile XBMP using a warezed copy of the Xbox SDK. This was going to be the case until the OpenSDK project reached some maturity. This is why the XBMP website only supplies source and I have to scavenge binaries from Usenet or IRC.
Assuming I was right in the first place, is this still the case? Be kind of a bummer if the only way to test your patch for this competition is via an illegally ripped MS SDK.
You win again, gravity!
Actually, I replaced my Win2k (I hadn't discovered mplayer when I built it) based DVD/DivX/mp3 box with a Xbox.
Reasons? The Xbox was a lot smaller, it had an IR remote (this was a big thing), it had good codec support out of the box (XBMP is based on mplayer so plays pretty much anything). It's noisy but not much more noisy. I recycled the PC to a family member and couldn't be happier with the result. The biggest plus is the hard drive I have chock-full with SNES, Genesis and MAME ROMs, all complete with a decent joypad to play them with.
I reckon you can now put together a chipped Xbox with a suitably big hard disk for about £300 or so, and at that price, I think it's a very compelling device.
You win again, gravity!
My one minor complaint about XBMP doesn't really have to do with any serious bug in the code. It's really an excellent piece of software, and I'm really thankful that someone did take the time to put it together. However, and maybe I'm missing a setting here, I do wish I could get the menus to fit on my tv. It seems to be set for PAL displays, which isn't a problem in movies because it allows the setting of the playback field, but does mean information like the current song title is cut off in the menu. Again, terribly minor, and trivial (especially if you're in the UK), but aside from the normal developmental strides that will no doubt take place it's the only thing I would really like a "fix" for.
Yes but it's all in one box. Some of us don't want a lot of boxes in our living romm, especially big beige ones. Further, DVD players are notoriously picky about the mp3s they play and rarely support other codecs and features such as replaygain, VBR and id3 tags.
Let me relate my situation: I have ~800 albums on my PC hard drive (all of my cds by the way). Theres a decent enough stereo system in my computer room but the home theatre setup in my living room is better. Any time me and my friends are listening to our Pink Floyd or Britney or whatever it's a pain having to leave the living room.
With the tunes on the xbox its just so much nicer and convenient sat on my sofa with the remote control. Also, to watch a DVD I don't even need to find it as it's probably already been XVid encoded and stuck on the hard drive.