[mythtv-users] Xbox as FE

Phill Edwards philledwards at gmail.com
Wed Sep 28 02:38:49 UTC 2005


> I am currently using minimyth on an EPIA-M as my frontend, and it
> generally works really well. However the connection to my TV is only
> Composite-out so the quality is not too hot (my TV doesn't do S-Video).
>
> I do have an Xbox running XBMC connected to my TV via SCART and the
> quality when playing videos is great so I'd like to investigate the
> possibility of using it as my front end. Of course another benefit of
> this would be that I get remote control functionality for free, as I'm
> using a wireless keyboard at the moment.
>
> However, most of the information I've found on the web is out of date,
> and the instructions at http://bit.blkbk.com/ refer to Xebian 1.0.3
> which I cannot locate at all.
>
> So with this in mind, can anyone share their experiences of setting this
> up? Can the xbox hardware handle the load? My back end is saving the DVB
> transport stream straight to disk and i'm not transcoding anything.
>
> Pros / Cons?

Lots on this in the archives so I'm not going to go into much detail
other than to say that another option to xebian is xbmcmythtv which is
a python script based GUI front end which runs in Xbox Media Centre.
Find it at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=128346

One of the big advantages of this solution is that you don't have to
boot into Linux so startup times are a _lot_ quicker, plus it's
probably a bit easier to configure as it's just a few settings screens
- you don't have to worry about setting up a whole linux OS etc.
Downside is that the functionality is not as rich and you have to
download a patched mplayer to play files transcoded to MPEG4.

Regards,
Phill


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