Ideas for modern-day applications of XBMC4XBOX?
Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2016 10:00 am
Back when you could get SD-quality video of anything, XBMC was amazing thing to have, almost a decade ahead of its time. Silly as it sounds, I have a ton of memories associated with XBMC, and it will always have a place in my heart.
It's now 2016, and I still have my xbox hooked up to the component jacks on my TV. I use it mostly for CoinOPs, and the occasional Burnout 3 session. Sometimes, I'll fire up XBMC to play some streaming Internet radio, or to watch a few SD shows from my SMB share. But the fact that I can't play HD video on my stock Xbox hardware has meant the end of using xbmc4xbox as a primary digital media center for some time.
Lately, I've been trying to think of of ways to make xbmc4xbox more useful as a platform. I recently did some hacking in autoexec.py and wrote a script that would play a random demoscene radio station at xbmc4xbox startup, and run a screensaver from ~30,000 wallpapers. (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGL7zwus-tI , details: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... =17&t=5430) Recently, I also downloaded the full music pack from keygenmusic.net, converted all 5000 songs to mp3, and put it on my xbox as another option for music playback.
I've really enjoyed this setup - I can turn on XBMC, and have a neat audiovisual entertainment sort of thing in the background while I code or hang out, and my friends have complimented it. Best of all, I feel like I'm keeping XBMC alive in a way that I legitimately enjoy, not just for nostalgia. In fact, I have it on in the background right now
The point:
This has gotten me thinking - XBMC is a great platform for presenting media. It can handle playing large media libraries, it can stream online media (mostly audio), and has a very slick interface and well-developed interface design features. It has GUI features that are beyond comparison to the other dash/menu frameworks out there.
So I pose a question:
What are some ideas for what xbmc4xbox could do today as a platform?
It will never again be your primary media center, but it can do something funky and cool when you turn it on. You turn on your Xbox, and XBMC4XBOX uses your TV and sound system to do something awesome!
Remember, nowadays it's pretty easy to put a 2TB hard drive in an Xbox, so there's the possibility for having huge media libraries onboard (possibly downsampled), for a sort of "nostalgia box". Streaming Internet radio is also a great way of getting a variety of music without taking up a ton of space with files.
Just post what you think would be a cool idea, whether realistic or not! Or just post any cool type of media that it would be possible to get a huge number of files for, at the user's discretion, to use the Xbox as a showcase of sorts using already built-in features. It doesn't have to be a killer app, just any cool trick you think that XBMC could do with a bunch of media. (if I like your idea, I might try to work on it myself, and post a how-to... )
Here are some that I came up with:
- Streaming radio box - get a ridiculous number of streaming Internet radio stations, and play random ones, maybe in conjunction with something else
- Music video box - getting a ridiculous amount of music videos, (maybe "retro"), downconverting them to playable format, and playing them on shuffle when box turns on
- Playing video from one music video and audio from another randomly, to create a sort of "mashup" just for fun. I bet there is a lot of potential for mashups with video collections, though. What kind of videos would be fun to randomly mash up with music, that one might be able to get a huge variety of?
- CoinOPs menu (probably unrealistic; can coinOPs games be launched from outside the CoinOPs app? this is an "if only" thing that keeps occurring to me...)
- Some kind of personal photo album slideshow, but with something more...?
- Some way of rating and possibly deleting content on the fly for "pruning" content from a large library
It's now 2016, and I still have my xbox hooked up to the component jacks on my TV. I use it mostly for CoinOPs, and the occasional Burnout 3 session. Sometimes, I'll fire up XBMC to play some streaming Internet radio, or to watch a few SD shows from my SMB share. But the fact that I can't play HD video on my stock Xbox hardware has meant the end of using xbmc4xbox as a primary digital media center for some time.
Lately, I've been trying to think of of ways to make xbmc4xbox more useful as a platform. I recently did some hacking in autoexec.py and wrote a script that would play a random demoscene radio station at xbmc4xbox startup, and run a screensaver from ~30,000 wallpapers. (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGL7zwus-tI , details: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... =17&t=5430) Recently, I also downloaded the full music pack from keygenmusic.net, converted all 5000 songs to mp3, and put it on my xbox as another option for music playback.
I've really enjoyed this setup - I can turn on XBMC, and have a neat audiovisual entertainment sort of thing in the background while I code or hang out, and my friends have complimented it. Best of all, I feel like I'm keeping XBMC alive in a way that I legitimately enjoy, not just for nostalgia. In fact, I have it on in the background right now
The point:
This has gotten me thinking - XBMC is a great platform for presenting media. It can handle playing large media libraries, it can stream online media (mostly audio), and has a very slick interface and well-developed interface design features. It has GUI features that are beyond comparison to the other dash/menu frameworks out there.
So I pose a question:
What are some ideas for what xbmc4xbox could do today as a platform?
It will never again be your primary media center, but it can do something funky and cool when you turn it on. You turn on your Xbox, and XBMC4XBOX uses your TV and sound system to do something awesome!
Remember, nowadays it's pretty easy to put a 2TB hard drive in an Xbox, so there's the possibility for having huge media libraries onboard (possibly downsampled), for a sort of "nostalgia box". Streaming Internet radio is also a great way of getting a variety of music without taking up a ton of space with files.
Just post what you think would be a cool idea, whether realistic or not! Or just post any cool type of media that it would be possible to get a huge number of files for, at the user's discretion, to use the Xbox as a showcase of sorts using already built-in features. It doesn't have to be a killer app, just any cool trick you think that XBMC could do with a bunch of media. (if I like your idea, I might try to work on it myself, and post a how-to... )
Here are some that I came up with:
- Streaming radio box - get a ridiculous number of streaming Internet radio stations, and play random ones, maybe in conjunction with something else
- Music video box - getting a ridiculous amount of music videos, (maybe "retro"), downconverting them to playable format, and playing them on shuffle when box turns on
- Playing video from one music video and audio from another randomly, to create a sort of "mashup" just for fun. I bet there is a lot of potential for mashups with video collections, though. What kind of videos would be fun to randomly mash up with music, that one might be able to get a huge variety of?
- CoinOPs menu (probably unrealistic; can coinOPs games be launched from outside the CoinOPs app? this is an "if only" thing that keeps occurring to me...)
- Some kind of personal photo album slideshow, but with something more...?
- Some way of rating and possibly deleting content on the fly for "pruning" content from a large library