XBMC Discontinues Xbox Support

Xistic writes with news that the XB in XBMC won't mean Xbox any more. Quoting the project's own website: "The last official release for the XBOX by the XBMC team was Atlantis, over 18 months ago. Since then, one brave soul (Arnova) has been merging code from the main codebase into the XBOX branch in our repository. Because there were many users out there that took advantage of these updates, we had no problem with this. But times have changed. The XBOX has hard limits for what it can handle. Some users are satisfied with these limits, and we encourage them to use XBMC there if they are happy. But it is a popular misconception that official XBOX development is still taking place by the team, so we have decided to set it free. We have enough on our plates already, and worrying about a deprecated platform just increases our workload. A few days ago the XBOX branch was finally removed from our subversion repository."

Great move by the XBMC team (Still a little sad)

[AZURERAZOR]

As a XBMC user on the old Xbox platform, I would like to say thank you to all the code monkeys out there who made that old junky hardware viable for nearly ten years even though it was not the purpose design for the hardware.

I see this as a great move for the project to disregard the limitations of the original hardware as they revitalize the project to better compete with some of the other Media Center software that has started looking more attractive in the last 2 years.

Good by Xbox, you had a good run!

The Xbox graphics chipset

[tepples]

The Xbox graphics chipset had only two advantages over PC chipsets of the time: 3D graphics, and SDTV output as a standard feature. The SDTV feature is less important now that virtually all TVs made in the past three years have VGA and HDMI inputs. And unless one writes half the video decoder in a shader (as in some modern H.264 decoders), 3D graphics won't take much load off the CPU for video decoding; perhaps the biggest thing a GeForce 3-class pixel shader can do is help convert YUV to RGB. Remember that the video codec that was popular among pirates and spaceshifters at the time was MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (DivX and Xvid), which is roughly on par with Theora [s2000.ws] and less computationally complex than H.264.

Re:Can a nettop that can run media centre software

[Andy Dodd]

Nearly all nettops are NVidia ION based.

The CPU in any nettop (at the worst a single core Intel Atom) is somewhat better than the 733 MHz PIII in the Xbox (Maybe significantly? I'm assuming the PIII has significantly better performance per clock cycle than the Atom, but I'm not sure if it's enough of a delta to make up for less than half the clock speed), and the Ion is a significantly better NVidia chipset than the one in the Xbox.

OUCH Hurting the POOR in us all.

[lordmage]

Wow. Just hurt us people who rely on CHaOS (Cheap Array of Obsolete Systems). The Xbox was a 39.99 dollar media center which played all DVD's and some good games on the TV and it was networked into the File servers. It is GREAT and XBMC is great too... and now.... wow.

Come on, Whats the point of XBMC if you dont have it on an Xbox. Btw, just crack the darn 360 and put it there too... or the ps3 or.. Wii... for gosh sakes!

Oh bullshit....

[BLKMGK]

Fork over a couple hundred bucks and move up from a single core P3 for kripes sake! Why in this world would you want to hold back development of a damned good HTPC software in order to satisfy an ever smaller number of slow proprietary machines? Would you be happier if they just dropped XBOX out of the name entirely and called it something else? These guys don't want to have to sweat the low end hardware anymore and are trying to move forward - as someone who has the newer hardware I commend them! These guys aren't just piling on all sorts of CPU intensive stuff expecting some monster CPU to run it but hamstringing them to sweat performance on a single core P3 class CPU with no memory that has to be hacked just to install and compiled by a pirated compiler is just silly.

Yes, I still have an XBOX hacked to run older XBMC and that build is like 2 years old - still runs as well now as when it was installed so who cares? There's now folks just working on the XBOX version and that's great but there's no way it's fair to ask the current team who has their sights set on bigger things to keep looking backwards to support the old. Better to drop support than support it poorly and hear the bitching when something breaks.