VashTS said:
thanks for the suggestions i am going to try out xbmc eventually. i do want it as a media device, im probably going to leave in the baby's room so when he is old enough i can have everything on a hdd on the xbox.
is it possible to wirelessly ftp to the xbox? if so guess ill need to get a wireless adapter.
Then you want XBMC as your default dashboard.
By the way, XBMC got an SMB client built in, so you can stream media off a Windows share instead of storing the media files locally on the Xbox if you want. That way you can save the space for the stuff that has to be run off the hdd, like games, emulators, etc.
I wouldn't recommend using any of those autoinstaller disks without knowing what you're doing on a softmodded box. And the first thing you should do before doing anything else is to make an eeprom backup, if you manage to screw up royally you might need those to reinstall the Xbox. If you're lucky the softmod app did that backup when your Xbox was modded, look for a folder called eeprom in the root folders. If you can't find it there, install EvoX, start it from your current dashboard, and make a backup using the "Backup eeprom" option.
Once you've backed up your eeprom, a simple way to make XBMC your default dashboard is to replace your current dashboard executable with a forwarder that points to your XBMC executable:
* Unpack and ftp XBMC to a folder of your choice on your Xbox, my suggestion is f:\xbmc. Launch it to check that it works correctly. This is important, if it doesn't work once you make it your default dashboard, you'll be in for a lot of work to make your Xbox bootable again.
*
Download XBE shortcut maker and unpack it.
[edit] XBE shortcut maker is compiled with a homebrew SDK, not XDK, so it's completely legal to distribute.
* Run XBE shortcut maker and input the path to XBMC's default.xbe in the "Target Path" field. If you used my suggestion that would be f:\xbmc\default.xbe. It's crucial you get the path exactly right, the Xbox will try to boot whatever path you entered, and if it points to a non existing path... well, you catch my drift. Leave the rest of the fields as they are. Click "Create Shortcut" Save the generated file as default.xbe on your computer.
* Make a folder on the Xbox' F drive, put the default.xbe you generated with XBE Shortcut Maker in it, and try launching the forwarder. If XBMC starts, you did it right, and it's safe to go on to the next step. Remove this folder when you're done, it's just for testing, we want to make sure that every link in the chain we can check works before we pass the point of no return.
* Locate your current dashboards default.xbe, you'll probably find it at f:\UnleashX\default.xbe or something like that. Make a backup of that default.xbe, and overwrite it with the default.xbe you generated with XBE Shortcut Maker.
* Optional: Time for some cleaning up. Make a new folder on your Xbox' F drive, and copy everything
except default.xbe (the forwarder xbe) from the UnleashX folder to the new folder. Copy the backup you made of UnleashX' default.xbe to this folder too. Now you have a working install of UnleashX again, in case you'd want to use that for something later.
* Reboot your Xbox, now it should boot into XBMC. What happens is that the BIOS points to the default.xbe in your old UnleashX folder, which is a forwarder that in its turn points to XBMC's default.xbe, which now will boot as your dashboard.
I haven't got a lot of experience with using softmodded Xboxes, I've just done softmodding as a step when flashing the TSOP to be able to run the unsigned apps needed for that, but perhaps a better and safer solution would be to just modify the boot paths in the BIOS image, if that's possible with a softmodded Xbox. If it is, you'll have the possibility to select more than on boot path, so if the default boot option breaks, the Xbox will try to boot the next one in line. That way you'll have a way out if something goes wrong when updating XBMC in the future. That method would be a lot cleaner too, no need to keep your old UnleashX folder, no forwarders, etc.
