XBMC

I finally got it working. For the past month or two, I've had a "back-burner" project that I've been working on off and on. I'm sure if I dedicated a day to it and had all the necessary tech, I couldn't probably crank it out in a few hours. I'm talking about Xbox Media Center. This is a cross platform media center that you can use for all sorts of awesome stuff. I basically turned my brother-in-law's Xbox classic into a linux machine that I can stream tons of movies, videos, music, etc.

This is the tutorial I used. http://www.techfreaks.org/articles/modxbox.shtml

Basically, you need to copy a linux installer on the xbox hard drive (as a gamesave) and a game specific gamesave. In my case, I used Splinter Cell. Once you do that, you follow the directions. Basically, this bridges two connections on the motherboard and breaks the encryption that Microsoft put on the Xbox console. It's pretty nerdy.

Once you've done this, you have a "modded" xbox that you can load stuff on. I went further and installed XBMC, so that would be my default dashboard. Most people would stop at this point and be happy. Not me. I continued and installed a 500 GB hard drive. I like having a hard drive 100 times larger to store my games, music, videos (all legal) on the Xbox. More details to follow on my next post.