WB: Original Xbox

[Xzinum]

Anybody have an original xbox (preferably modded) for sale or collecting dust?
Needed for media center for my Tv. No need for games or any fancy controllers. As long as the xbox works.

[MaLeK]

Perhaps... i gotta find it first.

[Sweetlou]

i know my buddy has one im sure i can get him too sell his, give me a few days ill hit u back on here with the word

[Xzinum]

Thanks to both of you.

[Mike-KT]

If there ends up being 2 xboxs for one buyer I'd also be interested in purchasing.

Modded would be very prefered

[Xzinum]

If there ends up being 2 xboxs for one buyer I'd also be interested in purchasing.

Modded would be very prefered

You can still do the soft-mod if it comes down to it, but i'd rather have the hard mod done already.

[marvel]

Anybody have an original xbox (preferably modded) for sale or collecting dust?
Needed for media center for my Tv. No need for games or any fancy controllers. As long as the xbox works.

I think I can hook you up if those guys cant, but I think you should know that shows ripped into hd264 don't work that well, in fact, they lag (I have seen this on 3 xboxes).

[Xzinum]

I think I can hook you up if those guys cant, but I think you should know that shows ripped into hd264 don't work that well, in fact, they lag (I have seen this on 3 xboxes).

You mean shows that are ripped as HD? Those normal 174mb half hour shows work well, but the 700mb rip of the same show are laggy?

[WiseGuy]

I think he's just saying that the Xbox lacks the processing power to decode a H264 encoder.

Though it is already two or three years old, it is still quite a bit newer than the older MPEG-4 based codecs like WMV9 and Xvid. Its main first adopters have been digital video distributers such as Apple who want to pack as much quality as possible into the smallest possible package, and interestingly enough, anime fansubbers, who realized that the extremely accurate motion search capability of H.264 increases quality greatly.

The main advantage of H.264 is its incredibly high video quality, which is superior to every other major codec on the market at high bitrates. This allows you to either get crystal-clear quality at the same bitrate or get similar quality to WMV9 at a much lower file size. It has many disadvantages, however. First of all, while it can be put in a .AVI file, it has many modern features such as B-frames which either don't work in .AVI files or require ugly programming hacks in order to. Thus the developers will always tell you not to use .AVI files. The container I'd recommend is .MKV, Matroska, simply because anyone who has the ability to play H.264 video will almost certainly be able to open a Matroska file. MKV files also support streaming, just like WMV.

H.264 is also slow to encode, like WMV9, and additionally requires more CPU for playback than any other modern codec. However, all modern processors should be able to play lower resolution video without stuttering, especially as the decoder is multithreaded. H.264 video will probably not work in real-time on older Pentium 3 systems, however, and the absolute highest resolution videos (1280x720) may have a minimum requirement of 1.5-2Ghz or so for playback. A warning for extremely high resolution videos: I recently encoded a 1680x1050 H.264 video; it would not run on anything less than a Core 2! There is a trick if you have a slower machine, however; CoreAVC decoder (not free) can be up to two times faster!

[SniperGimp]

I must say, that was quite informative wise, and a good read =)

[The Killing Joke]

Quick question, since I see we have a good portion of experts focused in this thread. I have a standard, unmodded XBOX. With a softmod/hardmod, what could it do that it doesn't right now?

[WiseGuy]

learn to love

[cujo]

learn to love

win comment of the day. subtly placed, doesn't draw too much attention... bravo good ser, bravo.

[Xzinum]

Quick question, since I see we have a good portion of experts focused in this thread. I have a standard, unmodded XBOX. With a softmod/hardmod, what could it do that it doesn't right now?

From what i gathered from friends and the interwebz, you load up XBMC or other media centers and you can have the ability to browse the web, watch videos from a network attached storage device and listen to music stored on your NAS. There is probably other uses to it, but for the most part, those three are the ones i'm interested in. Check the XBMC site for more info.

You could load XBMC on a linux box and run that as your media center, but it's really not practical for me with the limited space i have.

[The Killing Joke]

From what i gathered from friends and the interwebz, you load up XBMC or other media centers and you can have the ability to browse the web, watch videos from a network attached storage device and listen to music stored on your NAS.

Great. So this means I'll have yet another Media Option attached... I've asked for an upconverting DVD Player with USB Input, so that I can play media from an external USB HD, and now, I've got a Media Centre to plug in. Guess I better get under the house so I can cable up the XBOX with the rest of the LAN.

:))

Second question - where does one go about getting the hardmod done, or how does one do it themselves? (Yes, I'm pretty damn handy with a soldering gun, in case it can be done myself.)

[marvel]

You mean shows that are ripped as HD? Those normal 174mb half hour shows work well, but the 700mb rip of the same show are laggy?

Well Wise said everything that needed to be said. The shows doesn't have to be 700 mb, a 174mb show ripped as h.264 will lag on your xbox. For example, all the episodes of Bleach are now ripped into h.264, so they lag on the xbox.

P.S.
I was actually thinking of getting a ps3 so I could turn it into a media center, but I gave up on that since I heard that not all the avi run on the PS3...Can someone confirm me this (Looking at WiseGuy)?

[Xzinum]

P.S.
I was actually thinking of getting a ps3 so I could turn it into a media center, but I gave up on that since I heard that not all the avi run on the PS3...Can someone confirm me this (Looking at WiseGuy)?

Even if you load linux on it?

[marvel]

That's what I've been asking everybody that I know who's got a PS3 and none of them have tried it, its like they are all afraid of linux. I've even offered my help to them to install linux but they don't want to. I know a lot of .avi have stop working on the ps3 after an update, but if they all work under linux, it's all good.

[WiseGuy]

My PS3 has run every media format I've plugged into it, but I haven't exactly done much testing. I've downloaded some 20 odd movies burned them onto DVD in data format and all of them have worked so far save one - but i think that file was broken (can't remember what it was).

Hmmmmm actually if you want i can do some testing with this when i get home. All i can tell you is that my MP3 player has a 240x320 screen on it and i used a custom encoder to upload video files to it. I think they're mp4.u10 as extension or something... and my PS3 even detected those and played it.

But ill try uploading some .mkv's .ogm's .rtv(whatever the real player one is) and seeing what works.






now that i think about it - i think that one movie that didn't work was an .avi file with some random encryption on it.... but still so far like 99% success rate, with the 1% being something sketchy.

[SharpShooter]

.avi files do not work on the PS3, I just tested like 40 some odd Movies.

That being said, I use TVersity as a media center on my computer and just stream the movies to my PS3 as there is an option to have your movies converted as your streaming them, which is pretty nice.

[WiseGuy]

wierrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd