Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.
I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV.
This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.
I didn't have wired networking everywhere in the house. So I would torrent the latest episode of a TV show (before it released in my own country) at something like 45 kbps. At 350 MiB it was usually possible to watch the episode the same evening I started the download. Once it was finished I'd have to carry the box upstairs to FTP the episode to the Xbox's HDD and then carry it back down again to connect to the TV.
Later, I would run Azureus inside of a Linux distro on the Xbox to download content directly.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”.
I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.
Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.
And no, alternative skins never improved that any.
Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.
I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.
Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.
[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content.
1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to this day, I am not really confident about what it's going to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause? Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention which yes, is terrible.
2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work, awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?"
3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a file.
That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying enough for me to take the time to try something else like Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their web site what they offer that differentiates them from Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.
I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.
I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it was incredible for its time but not even being able to play 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get today.
It could output analogue 720p and 1080i for sure, but the CPU had a hard time keeping up with HD video decoding. It was only a 733mhz Pentium 3 after all.
Although to go on a tangent, it turned out that you could swap the soldered BGA processor for a socketed 1.4ghz Pentium meant for a desktop PC, using an incredibly cursed interposer setup to redirect the CPU pins to the right BGA pads, and it somehow actually worked.
What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?
With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).
XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to
assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will
scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it
directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then rinse and repeat.
Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it so I could do what you did.
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.
Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.
Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?
In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.
I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
I loved XBMC and still use Kodi to this day. Back then, I even proposed and POCed what's now a part of their Add-On system, essentially a fuse-like virtual file system forwarded to Python. Before that, each Add-On had to bring its own UI. This was basically my first OSS contribution and the community was really supportive and welcoming.
XBMC really takes me back. I used to love using this, and then when it switched to Kodi I got a bit confused but kept using it. Finally I moved over to Plex because I recall having some issues with Kodi i can't remember these days. But while I love Plex, i don't love the proprietary feeling of it, and would still prefer something truly open.
Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!
I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.
That's some impressive dedication to continue homebrew on the OG Xbox in 2025. Much respect for that alone. Very cool to see such an old console get a first class modern media player experience.
Should have named it XBMC 360 because it has come full circle and it would continue their barbaric culture of naming it 'X' but building it for the complementary set of X. (i.e. it works on everything but XBOX 360)
XBMC on the original Xbox was so unbelievably far ahead of it's time, it's crazy and that's not just nostalgia talking.
Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.
I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV.
This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.
I didn't have wired networking everywhere in the house. So I would torrent the latest episode of a TV show (before it released in my own country) at something like 45 kbps. At 350 MiB it was usually possible to watch the episode the same evening I started the download. Once it was finished I'd have to carry the box upstairs to FTP the episode to the Xbox's HDD and then carry it back down again to connect to the TV.
Later, I would run Azureus inside of a Linux distro on the Xbox to download content directly.
Great times.
350MB so 2 would fit on a standard CDROM.
Crazy this was about 20 years ago...
And now streaming services are becoming “cable networks”. Capitalism at its finest.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”.
I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.
Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.
And no, alternative skins never improved that any.
Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.
I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.
Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.
[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/
We got tons of people to use XMBC, even moms and similar.
But Kodi, Kodi even I couldn't figure out, Jellyfin + Infuse is bog simple.
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content.
1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to this day, I am not really confident about what it's going to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause? Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention which yes, is terrible.
2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work, awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?"
3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a file.
That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying enough for me to take the time to try something else like Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their web site what they offer that differentiates them from Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.
If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic. IYKYK
Being able to play VIDEO_TS files directly blew my mind; no need to argue about compression with our massive 250 GB drives ... ;)
Oh yea - and DCC transfers for content from IRC. mmmmm
XBMP is the main reason I got my Xbox, it was fantastic. And later I even played a few games on it!
Yes! So many streaming sources and high performance/responsiveness.
I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.
I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it was incredible for its time but not even being able to play 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get today.
I don't think Xbox had 1080p support? That would be somewhat annoying to be limited by.
1080i though
It could output analogue 720p and 1080i for sure, but the CPU had a hard time keeping up with HD video decoding. It was only a 733mhz Pentium 3 after all.
Although to go on a tangent, it turned out that you could swap the soldered BGA processor for a socketed 1.4ghz Pentium meant for a desktop PC, using an incredibly cursed interposer setup to redirect the CPU pins to the right BGA pads, and it somehow actually worked.
this is my goto for xbox gen1 HDMI - Electronxout[0]. Here's a full list of video options[1]
[0] https://electron-shepherd.com/products/electronxout
[1] https://www.xbox-scene.info/forums/topic/657-list-of-all-og-...
What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?
With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).
XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox:XCAT
Same. Executer mod chip?
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then rinse and repeat.
Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it so I could do what you did.
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
[1] http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...
People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.
Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.
Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?
In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.
That link just unlocked a core memory I haven't thought about since I was 17 years old, so thanks for that!
I remember that there were 2 games that you could use to modify your xbox but I only remember 1 game. Mechassault.
Mechassault, 007 Agent Under Fire and Splinter Cell.
More recently there are other game exploits, such as THPS4. However, since ENDGAME you don't even need a game to softmod.
I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
> Not on exhibit to the public.
=(
I loved XBMC and still use Kodi to this day. Back then, I even proposed and POCed what's now a part of their Add-On system, essentially a fuse-like virtual file system forwarded to Python. Before that, each Add-On had to bring its own UI. This was basically my first OSS contribution and the community was really supportive and welcoming.
I used that to build my XM Radio Online plugin!
XBMC really takes me back. I used to love using this, and then when it switched to Kodi I got a bit confused but kept using it. Finally I moved over to Plex because I recall having some issues with Kodi i can't remember these days. But while I love Plex, i don't love the proprietary feeling of it, and would still prefer something truly open.
Jellyfin + Infuse on Apple TV has been quite wonderful. Jellyfin alone works fine if you have various other players.
As much of an achievement as this is, I think much of the charm is sadly lost in later versions of XBMC.
Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!
I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.
That's some impressive dedication to continue homebrew on the OG Xbox in 2025. Much respect for that alone. Very cool to see such an old console get a first class modern media player experience.
Should have named it XBMC 360 because it has come full circle and it would continue their barbaric culture of naming it 'X' but building it for the complementary set of X. (i.e. it works on everything but XBOX 360)