Many years back I had this obsession about building a perfect media center for our living room.. it must play almost every media I feed in to it.. like videos, music, pictures, stream radio via the net.. well fortunately I made one.. its an AMD K62 PC with a 400mhz processor speed.. it was connected via ethernet port.. it was okay.. it was running windows 2000 pro OS.. it didn't last that long because it just feels like a PC connected to television.. it lacks intuitive controls and you need a mouse and a keyboard to get around with almost any obstables of windows.. after a few months it never returned to the living room..

Well after a few years, then came the those DVD players that can play MP3 files and WMA.. and there came those dvd players that can play videos encoded in Divx, Xvid and almost any Mpeg 1 and 2 encoded files.. it also plays audio files like mp3 and wma.. well I thought we were gonna be happy with our Philips divx player... actually we were happy with this player becase i can put around 6 full length divx/xvid movie inside a single dvdr.. and you can also burns hundreds and hundreds of mp3s to a single dvdr.. but there was still this certain limitation to this player.. it also lacks the flexibility that I've been always looking for.. it was like a dead end.

Then few weeks back.. We were deciding on buying a console gaming platform.. well it was no contest.. cause we've always wanted to own an Xbox. Well.. after days and days of looking for an Xbox over the net.. we found the perfect one for us.. though it was a second hand unit.. but it got with it some enticing specifications.. it was a modified xbox.. it clearly came from an avid console gamer cause while looking at the controllers it was clearly and roughly used.. though I never mind a used controller because these xbox controllers(duke) are built to last... it also came with a 160GB 7200rpm hard drive that came with 42 xbox games in it.. when we got it.. it was like heaven owning one of these machines.. then I tried playing with it more.. I mean tweaking with it more and modifying system settings etc.. sadly.. I have this habit of taking things apart and see how it works.. i opened up the controllers and the xbox case to see whats inside.. im just happy seeing the internals of electronic devices.hehehe. while playing with the xbox I saw this XBMC program included in it. I tried running it and I was just blown away by this XBMC program. XBMC stands for Xbox Media Center which was developed via XDK or the Xbox development kit. Nope, it was not developed by Microsoft. With XBMC the possibilities are endless. You can stream videos from the web or your pc like Divx, xvid, quicktime, mpeg, realvideo, vp6, wmv and other popular video codecs. you can stream audio files like mp3, ogg, wav, aac, mp4, wma and more..

Though the XBMC build included in my xbox was quite an old release(2003). It was still very useful.. When I was learning more about my xbox. I learned that xbmc is still alive and everyday there are new CVS builds being released from different xbmc developers.. and yes it was open sourced. Each builds of xbmc came from different developers, each of them maybe better than other builds.. Right now I'm using the T3CH build release which was pretty stable. And most all of the XBMC users agree that the T3CH releases are quality builds.. And will not ruin your xbox..

The hardest part of XBMC was making your xbox recognize your pc.. Yes, the xbox has a builtin Ethernet port so you can connect it via LAN and connect it to your router.. the ethernet port was there because of xbox Live and system link for linking two or more xbox for multiplayer gaming.. Then when the xbmc was released it was fully maximized to stream every media content and configure your xbox remotely via ftp. For me the ethernet port is the life stream of xbox.. even if the dvd reader of the xbox gets broken you can still use it because of the ethernet port.. i rarely use the dvd reader of my xbox cause you can load games in to its hard drive.. it loads faster than playing it with the dvdreader.. Streaming videos from your pc was not that easy because you need to reconfigure your subnet addresses to make your pc vissible with xbox.. and there are still lots to configure like the .ini files.. but after a few hours of trial and error you will eventually access your pc via samba shares.. the fun part is browsing your pc files from your xbox. when you find the files you are ooking just press a button and you can play it at once..

Navigating with xbmc was very intuitive. While playing audio files you can load visualizations that are similar to winamp.. remember those milkdrop visualizations for winamp? Yes, its there.. :) There are RSS feeds that you can manually configure to display news from bbc, cnn and other rss feeds available.. Anyway there are still alot of features that I can discuss but there are so many.. I even made xbmc my default dashboard so every time I turn on my xbox, xbmc will load... (it was a scary process but it was well worth it!) :)

To wrap it all up, the xbox was really made as a gaming machine.. but with xbmc it changed the way people look at the xbox.. it was a full fledged media player.. Running only on a mobile pentium 3 700mhz processor it can play almost anything you can feed with it. Though the xbox will be replaced with the new system called xbox360 this November. but, I assure you that this xbox will remain in my living room for years to come.. :D