Only a couple of weeks after going all gooey over SqueezeBox and SlimServer, I’ve found another way of doing media streaming at home. I’ve now joined that rebel group known as “XBox-modders”, and have a machine at home now running the XBox Media Centre.
XBox Media Centre requires a modded XBox to operate, though as I found out a software-mod-only XBox is fine (given the apparent illegality of mod-chipping in Australia). See another post for more info about how I modded.
XBMC lets me play my library of MP3s, listen to Internet Radio, watch movies (including ripped DVDs, apparently), and (perhaps most importantly to us right now) browse our digital photo gallery — all using the XBox DVD remote. It comes with its own streaming protocol server, which appears not to stream as such but rather just serve files, but does run on Linux (an ebuild for Gentoo was all ready to go). The interface is via TV, which makes sense for viewing movies and pictures but not so much for audio (of course you can turn the telly off once you’ve made your selection, or buy/build one of the LCD screen modules that XBMC knows how to address). For the truly keen there is a web server built into XBMC as well, that lets you control some functions from a browser (it worked alright with IE, but Safari on our Power Mac gave it trouble, and there are reports of unfriendliness with Firefox).
Cost-wise, XBMC has really only cost me an XBox (yes, I already had one, but unfortunately for one who said that he only ever bought an XBox in order to run Linux I’ve built a bit of a game collection, and until only very recently I believed that the only way I could run Linux or XBMC from bootup was to replace the XBox BIOS, an operation that would have rendered the XBox unable to play games. So I bought a new XBox for playing games, and modded the existing one. Then I found out that I didn’t need to replace the BIOS… Sigh…). I also bought the “Advanced AV Pack”(?), the little output box that gives you S-Video and optical audio output from the XBox. XBMC knows how to handle the digital output, and generates a superb-sounding AC-3 stream to our Yamaha amplifier (I never thought 128kbps MP3 could sound so good).
So is XBMC the “way to go”? Well, I’ll let you know. I’m happy so far — except for the freezes that have happened a few times, and the extraordinary amount of noise that comes out of the thing to keep the heat down (heat being a possible cause of the lockups, because I had not turned on a setting in XBMC that instructs it to increase the fan speed in response to rising temperature). I’ve yet to try a DVD in it yet, and the promised visualisations do not appear when playing music… Its competition is media streaming boxes like the Netgear MP-101 (which only does audio, has no digital output and requires proprietary Windows-only server software), the D-Link Media Gateway (?) (which does video and pictures but again requires Windows-only server software), Pinnacle’s media box (similar to the D-Link), and the SqueezeBox (great design, terrific software and community, but ghastly expensive by the time it lands in AU, with no video or picture capability). For now I think I’ve made the right call.
Crossed Wires 