XBMC for Mac OSX

Folks that know me know that I have some pretty strong opinions about the state of TV Media Playback --- there's only one answer -- and it ISN'T FrontRow. Simply said it's XBMC -- the lowly homebrew software for classic XBOX has bested everything out there.

I've known they've been porting the software to 'alternate' non-XBOX platforms - and I'm blown away again by their progress.... XBMC on my Mac is looking great. Check it out... not solid yet - but still way in front http://www.osxbmc.com/

XBMC -- still satisfying

So, back in June I picked up another used original XBOX -- and it was already softmoded with XBMC. Hooked it up this weekend with some new Netgear AC 200mbps Ethernet extenders (much better experience than last time I tried 802.11g). Now I've got DVD-less goodness on the two TV's in the house. No more broken & scratched kids DVD's for me.

XBMC even recognizes and browses other XBMC's on the network and supports playing content off of them.

Most of my content is offloaded on a 1.2 TB NAS - so all of it is available to both TVs.

One hint that I just figured out. You really want to keep all your ripped DVD's as ISO images. XBMC can't figure out that VIDEO_TS folders don't have to be DeCSS'ed -- and it fails to cache this knowledge. When they are in ISO format - this is cached and the second time you watch the video, it pops in a second. Also, the feature which remembers where you left off on each movie only seems to work on ISO images. So now I've got to batch convert all my VIDEO_TS folders to ISOs again (mkisofs is my new friend).

One note, ISO images over 4GB can't be played off the XBox's internal harddrive - it is running a variant of FAT32. Your best bet is to store it all on another drive formated with NTFS or UFS (which is what I'm using on my NAS).

It's all so beautiful