New Toy: Xbox
I treated myself to an Xbox earlier this week. I’m not much of a games player, save for the odd game of tetris or dopewars on my visor and the very occasional Q3a session and I have never owned a games console before so some may wonder why I bought an Xbox… well there were a couple of reasons driving the decision, namely the Xbox Media Player and Xbox Linux.
I was originally planning on putting together a Mini-ITX box as a mediaplayer/TV terminal but after some tinkering a chipped Xbox gives you a media player and a PC all in a nice, compact unit that fits in with your other set top boxes and it plays Xbox games to boot, and damnit the games are good!
The Xbox Media Player is an excellent native Xbox app that plays DivX, XVID, WMA/WMV/ASF movie formats, MP3 and Ogg audio formats and more. When combined with the Xbox DVD remote the interface is near perfect and the quality of DivX etc playback is much better than I was getting with Xine and the TV output from a Geforce 2. Very impressed.
I’ve put a quick guide to installing Debian Linux for the Xbox up.
This parody of Apple’s Switch ad campaign made me laugh (requires Shockwave Flash). I’m installing Linux on my orbiting brain lasers right now!
