Xbox as a Media Director

[ShamIAm]

Has anyone setup an orginal X-box as a Media Director? If so what issues did you encounter? If not does anyone have any idea why it would be a bad idea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Technical_specifications

[tschak909]

Nobody has, yet. But we are welcoming adventurous hackers to try.

-Thom

[nosilla99]

Has anyone setup an orginal X-box as a Media Director? If so what issues did you encounter? If not does anyone have any idea why it would be a bad idea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Technical_specifications

The lack of memory is the main limiting factor, but it does perform reasonably as a mythtv frontend

NOS

[ShamIAm]

What is the minimum memory recomendations for the Media Director?

The only thing I can find for for the Newbie Packs is 1-2 GB, and that just seems ridiculous for a thin client.

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Category:Media_Directors

[tschak909]

it would be.

Except,

LinuxMCE is not a thin client. All of the processing is done on the MD. All of the I/O is done at the core.

-Thom

[deffcon]

Hi,

Some info, some gentoox users have been successfull to boot xbox's from network using etherboot :

 Diskless xBox

It's been 7 loooong days but I have finally got my xBox to boot Gentoo Linux as a diskless thin client using Etherboot. The only problem which remains is that there's a problem with my kernel which means that interrupt 1 is being allocated to something and causes the USB initialization to fail. I don't think that this problem should be too difficult to solve, since it has been done before in the past, and I'm just hoping that one of the xbox linux kernel hackers points me in the right direction so that I can fix it.

I'm planning on using the xBox as a dual booting regular xBox games console and also as a mythTV frontend.

Have you installed mythfrontend on an xBox?

posted by Ben Dash @ 10:52 AM
2 Comments:

Blogger Ben Dash said...

    As an update; it's working great. I've been using the xBox dual booted as a MythTV frontend and a regular xBox for several months now. It's booting diskless using Etherboot. I ended up having to use the 2.6 kernel and the problem noted above as to do with the keyboard interrupt as documented on the Gentoo forums page, just search it for ben_dash postings

[deffcon]

Hi Again,

An update for the lovers of the xbox maybe want to get a running diskless MD on the xbox :

 Xbox Linux is GNU/Linux on your Xbox

The Xbox is a legacy-free PC by Microsoft that consists of an Intel Celeron 733 MHz CPU, an nVidia GeForce 3MX, 64 MB of RAM, a 8/10 GB hard disk, a DVD drive and 10/100 Ethernet. As on every PC, you can run Linux on it.

An Xbox with Linux can be a full desktop computer with mouse and keyboard, a web/email box connected to TV, a server or router or a node in a cluster. You can either dual-boot or use Linux only; in the latter case, you can replace both IDE devices. And yes, you can connect the Xbox to a VGA monitor.

Can't do it yourself? We can install Linux on your Xbox - for free!

See http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page


Dave

[tschak909]

64 mb is not sufficient for a media director. It's barely sufficient for an orbiter.

-Thom

[nosilla99]

@deffcon

I am running xebian (debian for xbox) on two xbox machines it takes an age to boot and startup X but it does work.

Once booted and running mythtv frontend the system is responsive and certainly usable.

I have access to all my media on the core using mythvideo.

But as already stated by Thom and myself forget any ideas of running it as a media director, it just is not going to happen with 64Mb of RAM

NOS

[ShamIAm]

What is the minimum memory recomendations for the Media Director?

The only thing I can find for for the Newbie Packs is 1-2 GB, and that just seems ridiculous for a thin client.

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Category:Media_Directors

Wow, I found more information, you can install up to 128MB in the Xbox, but that still won't be enough. According to the XBox-Linux.org forums

Normally, there are 256 MB RAM or 512 MB RAM inside the hardware of PC. But, there are only 64 MB RAM available inside the hardware of Xbox. Some software applications need a size of 128 MB RAM or 256 MB RAM to start. For example the Web browser "Mozilla Firefox" needs a minimum size of 128 MB RAM to run. If you want to see Video you need a minimum size of 256 MB RAM.

Since I think we can all agree video is fairly important here I would say the Xbox is out as a MD, but still a good canidate as a MythTV frontend to access my LinuxMCE media, until I can allocate funds to building true MD.