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What To Do With a Free Xbox 360 Pro?

Posted by samzenpus on from the donate-it-to-me dept.

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?"

7 of 416 comments (clear)

  1. Sell it by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its worth less to you than somebody who would use it for gaming.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
    1. Re:Sell it by bigstrat2003 · · Score: 3, 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".

      --
      "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
  2. Re:XBMC = Xbox Media Center by snuf23 · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    Sometimes my arms bend back.
  3. No IRS exceptions for prizes. by kklein · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nope, any prize must be claimed. See Publication 525, page 34. The example given is a $50 prize.

    Report on form 1040, line 21.

  4. Re:Why bother? by sexconker · · 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.

  5. Re:Why bother? by zav42 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wait a moment... For 100$ you are not getting the full development kit. This is just the dev system to write managed code. To develop a retail game or even a professional arcade title, devkits are MUCH more expensive last time I checked.

  6. Re:Why bother? by Anonymous Coward · · 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?