Finally, it’s done, and with fantastic results.

If you’ve been following along, you might remember that I was trying to build a low-end, low cost HTPC for my brother-in-law so he could watch downloaded content from his PC on his TV.  We put Ubuntu and MythTV on a really old PC I had laying around and it was a pain in the ass.  We got to the point where we were going to have to spend some coin on a VGA – TV converter… for around $70 at the local Fry’s.

At this point, I told him to think about getting an original Xbox and putting XMBC on it.  That’s exactly what he did.  He found an Xbox on Craiglist, with games, for under $100.   This past weekend, we did a softmod on it and installed XBMC and had it up and running in less than 30 minutes.  He was thrilled and his wife was also happy that she could play her MP3’s on it.  There was much rejoicing  and then we kicked each other’s asses on the boxing game he got.

So, this had a happy ending and I must say the latest releases of XBMC are superb.  I think one would be hard pressed trying to find something as robust.   We even had international streaming IPTV in matter of minutes, (it took a little while to find the files).

Important Links:

• UXE softmod Installation Tutorial
  
• XBMC (Xbox Media Center)
• XBMC-TV

We had found another website with a stream pack, but I can’t find it now.