Media Center III

This is turning into an epic...

We installed ubuntu 9.10 on the revo and then xbmc and all the goodies. Everything worked perfectly, the mediaplayer skin on the 24 inch lcd was very sweet. Only problem was the remote would not work. Installed and configured lirc and everything else but no joy. I also found out the remote also workd with the xbox - turning on the media center also turned on the xbox!

What to do? This got me interested in the xbox - which had been a throw-in trade item. It was able to browse the windows shares on xp and pick up video, audio and pics in windows-friendly formats. A neat program called connect 360 for osx set up the mac pro to share its itunes library with the xbox. So far so good. To get this to work on the pc i had to install windows media player and set it to share the files. It works but the windows media player keeps crashing.

This led me to windows media center, it has an xbox extender to allow and xbox to connect to it. So i installed the media center 2005 version on the revo. Took a while to download all the revo drivers and set the whole thing up. You have to download an update and the extender from microsoft and then enter a number from your xbox and after a few error messages it found the xbox. From the now xbox client i could run the media center. This seemed good - a nice skin and it picked up the local content. However, it couild play very few formats that are essential to a media center like FLAC and quicktime etc and while the online channels were neat like NPR it could not play any content as it did not support FLASH..so it is useless.

So we are back to square 1 - cant use apple tv as it is proprietary and doesnt support file formats in common use for content, ms media center is worse, and the open source xbmc is the best but would only sync with my lcd and not the big plasma. We could try the standalone players like popcorn etc but really why have so many devices?

The xbox seems to be the best possibility, the wireless controllers work well and are sturdy, the hdmi video/sound is excellent and the gui is ok. The question is how to set up the back end so that all content is served and played. So we need to test out a number of media types, esp flac for audio and videos. If the windows media player stability could be fixed and configured so it plays all types then that is a livable solution but i find it odd in 2010 to have to still deal with all these problems. I had a living room media center 10 years ago, a pc hooked to a zenith professional 29 inch tube tv that had vga input. The best solution would be to run xbmc as a client on the xbox 360 but ms does not allow that..

tomorrow - improve xbox back end