Xbox Media Center is an incredibly cool, must-have application for owners of modded Xboxes. It sets your Xbox free, it lets you play movies and music from the Xbox’s hard drive or from a remote server, it provides an interface to access stored games, pictures, video, and other Xbox applications, and it can even give you a weather report and news from an RSS feed. XBMC is really the reason I decided to get an Xbox in the first place.

I didn’t know I could even do this for awhile, but it turns out you can install Xbox Media Center as your default dashboard. It was hard to find information about how to do this at first, because everyone seems to use EvolutionX as their default dashboard and then install XBMC as an application they can start up from EvoX’s menu. But I finally found some instructions amid the mess of XBMC’s online documentation. The only issue I had was that even though the BIOS I’m using (Evox M8plus) is supposed to be able to boot to an executable named “nexgen.xbe”, it wouldn’t. Once I renamed the XBMC executable to evoxdash.xbe, it worked.

After installing XBMC, it’s good to spend some quality time with the XboxMediaCenter.xml configuration file. Lots of good stuff in there, and of course you’ll need to edit it if you want XBMC to read media files from a server. For example, here’s one of my “bookmarks”, as XBMC calls them, for telling XBMC where to browse for my movies on a server using Samba (Windows-style) shared folders:


< bookmark >
< name >Movies< /name >
< path >smb://username:password@192.168.1.104/Movies/< /path >
< /bookmark >


Where of course username and password are the appropriate credentials for accessing the shared folder, and 192.168.1.104 is the IP address of my server.

There’s lots of other good stuff in the XML file too, I’m still learning about it. On the whole, I’m really, really impressed with XBMC, both as a media player and a dashboard. The interface is polished and easy to use. I’ve only hit a couple small bugs (sometimes freezes when playing a picture slideshow), but I’m using a beta build so that’s to be expected. I highly recommend XBMC.