"I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks."
Around 2003/04, I bought a used original xbox from a friend of mine. In the moment it probably seemed like a pretty foolish investment, considering the Xbox 360 was ready to, or had already hit the open market. I purchased this aging piece of hardware without regard to its product shelf-life, because I had other more nefarious plans for it. For weeks it sat in my office, no games to play on it, no Television hooked up to it, it just sat, and waited. During that time I was reading, printing, compiling and testing, collecting all the information I would need to take this aged “game console” from a single purpose appliance to one of the most robust and powerful media hubs known in existence. To this day even I have not found a more powerful and flexible media center on which to play my multitudes of media types. From this single box, I can watch all my PVR’d television shows, video podcasts, and DVD rips. As well as and extensive number of codecs/formats: mp3, mp4, avi, mkv, ogg, thm, divx, xvid, and the list goes on and on. It will even play media that has been compressed and RAR’d into archives right from within the RAR file itself.
The Media Center for Xbox, or xbmc has taken the original hardware to it’s limits and is no longer developed for that platform. Thankfully the developers saw “outside the box” and have moved the concept onto a more universal platform that has continued to grow and mature. It makes an excellent replacement to the media center editions of Windows, linux installs, or AppleTV reloads as well as a liveCD/USB installation.
Recently the project has gained some traction with some sponsorships from IPTV startups Boxee and 9×9 Networks. This is a major win for an open source project. With active and interested subscription services using and supporting the platform, there is no place to go but up. While XBMC in it’s current iteration has no peer (especially in the private “closed source” sector) it appears that it will continue to exceed expectations for some time to come.
