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Thread: Great application for the X-Box

  1. #1
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    Great application for the X-Box

    I just setup a Pluto Home system (smarthome + media server, plutohome.com, free open source). It’s really cool. It has a streaming movie server, music server, pvr. Plus it does home automation and controls a/v equipment too. There’s only 1 problem…

    You designate 1 PC to be the server; they call it the core. It exposes a network boot image for any other PC in the house, so your PC becomes dual purpose—normal pc, or net boot and it’s a set top box. You control it with Bluetooth mobile phones or web pads. And all the set top boxes in the house work together. Your media even follows you as you move from room to room if you keep the phone on. The problem is I don’t have enough media pc’s for all the rooms in my house, and buying a full PC for each room is too expensive. Plus there’s no video cards for the PC that have component video output—which is the only way I can get HDTV into my tv.

    The X-Box seems perfect as a media director. It’s a PC inside, right? So why couldn’t it boot like normal as an Xbox, or net boot as a pluto media director? Then it would be part of a whole house solution that did everything. I could even use the Xbox to turn on my sprinklers if I wanted, and do all sorts of stuff with it. Plus, since Pluto gives it a network boot image, space is no longer an issue—all the software could be stored on the main server. And the XBox has component video and it’s quiet and cheap.

    Does anybody have an idea if it would be possible to use the XBox as a media director like that, doing a network boot? Then I could just buy a few of the XBox’s rather than having to buy regular PC’s.

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    With an un-modded xbox you can install Linux and a boot-loader run this (Google for soft-mod xbox or something like that). It's based around MythTV, so it's a Linux-based system (from the instructions it's Debian-based). It's also interesting to see there is an Asterisk component also (which provides VoIP services).
    I'm not sure if you could get an XBox to network boot, however, so you may instead need to get the network boot image, and work out how to install this distribution onto the xbox, or figure out what programs and configuration it uses, so that you can add them to a common xbox linux installation.

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    Anthropomorphic Personification shaithis's Avatar
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    If you chip or soft-mod your XBox you can install XBox Media Centre on it.

    Its a free app that has just hit its first 'release' version and will do DVD, DivX, XviD, pictures, MP3, WMA, stream from your TiVO and even give you news and weather It connects to Windows shares as well.

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    XBMC was the single reason i got an XBOX - fabulous app...
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