Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.
I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV.
This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.
I didn't have wired networking everywhere in the house. So I would torrent the latest episode of a TV show (before it released in my own country) at something like 45 kbps. At 350 MiB it was usually possible to watch the episode the same evening I started the download. Once it was finished I'd have to carry the box upstairs to FTP the episode to the Xbox's HDD and then carry it back down again to connect to the TV.
Later, I would run Azureus inside of a Linux distro on the Xbox to download content directly.
"Cut the cord and stop paying $80/mo" Funny how that was just representative of the money left on the table that was to be snatched up anyhow before long.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”.
I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.
Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.
And no, alternative skins never improved that any.
Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.
I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.
Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.
[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/
Part of the reason more people now understand how to use jellyfin etc is because they have been used to doing it with netflix and other apps etc for 10+ years
Sure, but I've figured out multiple Paradox game UIs, put many hours into a bunch of weird old crufty DOS games (Dominus, anyone? Darklands?), ran Gentoo as my main OS for several years (while preferring Windowmaker as my WM, for god's sake, hahaha)... and still got myself turned around in Kodi sometimes after many hours using it, in a way I never did in Netflix's UI (any of their UIs).
Kodi's got some really weird UI choices going on. I don't think it's the case that Netflix-alike UIs are anywhere near equivalently bad, but people are able to use them anyway just due to familiarity. I think Kodi's is simply a lot worse.
Even the parts of Jellyfin that don't resemble Netflix (as there's no user-facing equivalent in Netflix)—the server & library management portions—I find vastly easier to use than Kodi's equivalents.
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content.
1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to this day, I am not really confident about what it's going to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause? Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention which yes, is terrible.
2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work, awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?"
3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a file.
That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying enough for me to take the time to try something else like Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their web site what they offer that differentiates them from Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.
I run Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 4. I have the same complaints about it that you have.
And it is nice, I guess -- it's functionally simple to just play files over an SMB share. But the interface is... well, the interface was really amazing on the OG Xbox and that was a very long time ago.
So even though I keep Kodi around, most of my video-watching is with Plex, wherein: The library updates itself. The subtitles download themselves (the subtitles even theoretically sync themselves to the video). Stuff generally Just Works, even over the WAN.
Plex is very set-and-forget, and its performance is great on a ~$20 ONN streamer-box from Wal-Mart (and there's also smart TV apps and PC-oriented playback, of course).
The user experience is really good: The interface is very remote-centric and flows well while kicked back in an easy chair in front of a TV. My eldery, tech-averse dad uses Plex without any trouble, which he'd absolutely never be able to do with Kodi.
Amusingly, Plex is/was a fork XBMC. :)
Despite the complexities of its client-server model (where both sides are kind of fat), and the expense, I can't recommend Plex highly enough.
That said: Jellyfin is free both as in beer and as in libre. It also gets most of this stuff right, and from what I've read it's been improving steadily for a number of years. I'd have written about Jellyfin instead, but I don't have as much direct experience with it (and I paid for Plex a long time ago).
It comes with a dedicated remote (though it does support CEC), which solves #1, at the cost of having an extra remote.
I mainly hit #2 when scrubbing, often (worse on some compression types than others), it'll just freeze frame for a minute before everything catches up. This may be because I'm serving the content via HTTP to the Vera V, I've been meaning to try NFS and/or SMB. Never had issues with playback itself, probably because the Vera V hardware and the OSMC/Kodi build are co-developed, so there is pretty much always hardware decode support.
#3 surprised me; Kodi supporting just using my directory layout is why I use it over something like Jellyfin! I just added the HTTP share, and then navigate Videos->files->my_http_share_name and I'm in my directory structure.
Out of the box, what you get is a server with (Optionally! But included by default in e.g. the Docker image, I think) an official web UI.
It's multi-user, has decent parental controls, automatic metadata fetching from a bunch of sources, can live-transcode when a client needs it (I have that disabled because my server is too weak, LOL), lots of good stuff.
You'll manage it through the Web UI, mostly. Set-top platform clients tend not to include much in the way of management features. (which is fine, it's way more pleasant to do that through a browser)
The web UI is also a Netflix-alike interface. Watch straight from the browser, if you like.
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The one major concession that puts some people off it is that it works butter smooth if your file naming conventions match what it expects, but it gets a lot less-pleasant if they don't. There are some minor variations allowed but mine's basically like:
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).mp4
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).en.srt
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979).fr.srt
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.mp4
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Redux.en.srt
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/Apocalypse Now (1979) - Final Cut.mkv
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/The Making of Apocalypse Now.mkv
/movies/Apocalypse Now (1979)/extras/Trailer.mkv
For movies. This demonstrates naming for the movies themselves (in this case, three different cuts of the same movie), extra features (you can change the extra features folder name if you like; it may default to "featurettes" and I may have changed mine, can't recall for sure) and external subtitles. I think you can handle external audio files similarly, if you have any of that going on. There are also ways to categorize special features into like trailers or whatever, with directories, but I haven't bothered with that.
I think there is a way to put your subtitles in a "subs" directory or something like that, but I don't do it. Then again I rarely keep more than two sub languages, maybe three or four total files if there are separate SDH options, for a given video. Usually just English and if it's a foreign film maybe the original language's subtitles (the French file for Apocalypse Now above is just an example, I didn't look at a real directory to write it)
The naming on these is pretty flexible. Basically as long as it can find the series (the year helps a lot) and everything's got `sXXeXX` somewhere in it, it'll be fine. Spaces, dots, dashes, doesn't affect much. "asdf.s03e05 - Some Name (stuff in parens).mkv" will find TheTVDB's entry for season 3, episode 5 (even if the name and all that in the file name are wrong, doesn't matter, it ignores that). External subtitles work like for movies (just stick them alongside the video files)
One pitfall: every now and then you find a case where DVD/BluRay and aired orders differ. TheTVDB usually records multiple orders in these cases. I dunno how to force Jellyfin to prefer one or the other, I just figure out which it's preferring (usually the one TheTVDB shows you on the Web by default, I think?) and adjust to that.
Also note that rarely (but sometimes for important cases, like e.g. Looney Tunes) TheTVDB uses years for the seasons. So you'll want "Season 1965" and such for those. No big deal, just a weird quirk of certain shows' metadata. Not that common.
I think you can name the "specials" directory to... specials, and maybe even give it an arbitrary name in the Jellyfin settings, but I like "Season 0" or "Season 00" (either works, prepended zeros are ignored, I have both hanging around) because it matches the special episode naming in TheTVDB (like "s00eXX").
In a pinch, you can override which IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB, et c. ID that Jellyfin decided belonged to the movie or TV show, using the web UI, and make it re-scrape the metadata. Usually it's better to figure out why it got it wrong and fix that instead—that way you don't even have to care about Jellyfin's database of scanned metadata, you can always just have it re-create it from scratch with little or no fuss. (and you can also set it to write the metadata alongside your shows and movies in files, like Kodi can)
I think there might be a way to put things like IMDB IDs directly in file names to make it even more clear what you mean, but "name (year)" has been so reliable for me I've never bothered to look into it.
I base my naming and years on what I find in the metadata sources themselves, usually IMDB and TheTVDB for me. Surprisingly often, Wikipedia disagrees with these, and sometimes [ahem] acquired files also have file names recording years that disagree with those sources. Usually it seems to be a festival-circuit vs. wide-release thing, as those often fall in different years. The metadata source should win, since otherwise it'll make auto-scanning worse.
Some people are really set on things like having their movies categorized in folders by director or whatever, and that doesn't work too well with Jellyfin.
(I know that file naming explanation is a lot, but it's really not that complicated in practice, and there are docs but I found there were some "but can I..." or "is it necessary to..." gaps in it for me that I've tried to fill in above)
DESPITE the impression probably given by all that text, I've found this one of the greatest parts of Jellyfin. Delete a file? After a couple minutes, it's gone from the UI. Add some files? In a couple minutes, they show up. (and you can force re-scans to speed it up). Slightly rename a file? But Jellyfin still reads it as the same movie from its metadata source? Your watch history survives. Hell I think you can even delete a movie, then add it again later, and your watch history survives (as long as Jellyfin decides it's the same movie by ID). There's no cruft that hangs around to deal with. It's very low-stress. Like 99% of my "management" of Jellyfin is just rsycing files, LOL.
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As for non-Web clients:
- There's an official Roku client, but... most Roku devices have pretty limited codec support. The client works great though. If your server can transcode, this may be a totally fine choice. It's what I used for quite a while until enough of my files were in formats newer than h.264 that it was no longer viable.
- AppleTV has an official client. It's pretty good, but... if you can't transcode, there's one somewhat-common Dolby audio format (I forget which exactly) that AppleTV doesn't have a license to, so it causes problems. However, for that problem there's:
- Infuse (also AppleTV). It's amazing. The recent release supports multiple user accounts with different server access settings (not only can they log into Jellyfin with different credentials, they could conceivably use totally different servers), which is brilliant if you want parental controls or just to have different "watched" lists. It's free but there's a paid version with a few extra features that includes a license to that tricky audio format. I've been using this for years, at this point, and aside from wishing it supported multiple accounts (and it does now, as of very recently!) I've had no trouble with it at all. Also, Infuse supports other media servers as backends.
There are clients for tons of other platforms, too. And you can always Airplay or whatever from (say) a laptop.
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For going on the road (and short of taking your server with you) I have used two options:
- You can just use it directly over a VPN to your house, like Tailscale, if the client end's connection is solid (and your home connection is good, for that matter). I've streamed mid-quality 4K over such an arrangement, halfway across the US. You can even connect an AppleTV to Tailscale and take the AppleTV with you (it's much smaller than most servers, lol) for the full at-home experience while traveling (Christmas movie marathon at the in-laws' house this holiday season?)
- Long road trip with the kids and want them to watch Apollo 13 (and perhaps a couple Disney movies) while you drive to Cape Canaveral? Browse your Jellyfin web UI on the tablet they'll use, and download the file(s) you want straight from there. Play files in VLC. Done, no internet connection required. Being able to use the web UI is nice because you can browse categories and such, it's actually a fair bit better than something like using an SFTP client.
Yeah that part was amazing. It was 2006, I'd softmoded the Xbox with the Splinter Cell hack. I had 2MBs ADSL capped @ 10GB for international data but unlimited national. I was in a NZ only private tracker to take advantage of that and then the icing on the cake, streaming the multi volume rar files straight to the TV. It really was magic.
I still get comments along the lines of ‘remember when you had Netflix before Netflix? Man that was awesome, you could have made billions right?’ from former housemates and friends. I had XBMC in the living room connecting to my server which auto downloaded all the latest tv and movies. So to them i had something much better then Netflix well before Netflix got into online streaming.
100% Even when I stopped playing Xbox games, we would take that pimped out machine everywhere. Long before there was Netflix, there was an Xbox running XBMC loaded with movies and TV shows of questionable origins. Good times!
I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.
I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it was incredible for its time but not even being able to play 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get today.
Spec-wise, sure, but I suspect that if you ran a blind test between an Xbox running XBMC and an Amazon Fire Stick, most folks would prefer the XBMC experience (despite the 720p output).
It could output analogue 720p and 1080i for sure, but the CPU had a hard time keeping up with HD video decoding. It was only a 733mhz Pentium 3 after all.
Although to go on a tangent, it turned out that you could swap the soldered BGA processor for a socketed 1.4ghz Pentium meant for a desktop PC, using an incredibly cursed interposer setup to redirect the CPU pins to the right BGA pads, and it somehow actually worked.
What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?
With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).
XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to
assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will
scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it
directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then rinse and repeat.
Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it so I could do what you did.
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.
Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.
In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.
Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?
I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
I remember installing XBMC with a 360-style "blades" interface and being blown away by how much smoother and nicer it was then the blades interface on the Xbox 360 at the time.
Obviously the OS wasn't doing as much as an Xbox 360 was, but as an end user, it made me perpetually annoyed at what we "could have had" on the 360.
And then Microsoft changed the 360 UI to their windows 8 uwp Tile-style UI with even more ads and I realized that I underestimated how bad things could get.
Apparently the "blades UI" 360s are quite sought after. I wonder if any progress has been made on restoring the stock firmware. I never had one myself unfortunately, mine came preloaded with a later OS.
Those ancient 360s are probably doomed to hardware failure however. They didn't seem to fix the issues with the 360 being essentially disposable until very late in the release cycle.
> Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently.
As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years.
My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.
Yeah, the Pentium 2 and 3 CPUs were very capable. Even today I feel they can do a lot of work with the right tools and some shims to access modern stuff (SSH, RDP).
Maybe XBMC's kernel wasn't designed for multitasking and they're now adding better support. I could understand wanting to throw the whole CPU at whatever the user was doing, especially in early days.
I loved XBMC and still use Kodi to this day. Back then, I even proposed and POCed what's now a part of their Add-On system, essentially a fuse-like virtual file system forwarded to Python. Before that, each Add-On had to bring its own UI. This was basically my first OSS contribution and the community was really supportive and welcoming.
XBMC really takes me back. I used to love using this, and then when it switched to Kodi I got a bit confused but kept using it. Finally I moved over to Plex because I recall having some issues with Kodi i can't remember these days. But while I love Plex, i don't love the proprietary feeling of it, and would still prefer something truly open.
Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!
I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.
That's some impressive dedication to continue homebrew on the OG Xbox in 2025. Much respect for that alone. Very cool to see such an old console get a first class modern media player experience.
I didn't get consoles as a kid, but after moving out I bought my first console - a PS3 I jailbroke.
Showtime/Movian was my TV media player for years, actually worked pretty great until I got a Shield. Cool to see it is still being developed, like XBMC.
Should have named it XBMC 360 because it has come full circle and it would continue their barbaric culture of naming it 'X' but building it for the complementary set of X. (i.e. it works on everything but XBOX 360)
XBMC on the original Xbox was so unbelievably far ahead of it's time, it's crazy and that's not just nostalgia talking.
Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.
I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV.
This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.
I didn't have wired networking everywhere in the house. So I would torrent the latest episode of a TV show (before it released in my own country) at something like 45 kbps. At 350 MiB it was usually possible to watch the episode the same evening I started the download. Once it was finished I'd have to carry the box upstairs to FTP the episode to the Xbox's HDD and then carry it back down again to connect to the TV.
Later, I would run Azureus inside of a Linux distro on the Xbox to download content directly.
Great times.
350MB so 2 would fit on a standard CDROM.
Crazy this was about 20 years ago...
And now streaming services are becoming “cable networks”. Capitalism at its finest.
"Cut the cord and stop paying $80/mo" Funny how that was just representative of the money left on the table that was to be snatched up anyhow before long.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”.
I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.
Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.
And no, alternative skins never improved that any.
Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.
I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.
Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.
[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/
Part of the reason more people now understand how to use jellyfin etc is because they have been used to doing it with netflix and other apps etc for 10+ years
Sure, but I've figured out multiple Paradox game UIs, put many hours into a bunch of weird old crufty DOS games (Dominus, anyone? Darklands?), ran Gentoo as my main OS for several years (while preferring Windowmaker as my WM, for god's sake, hahaha)... and still got myself turned around in Kodi sometimes after many hours using it, in a way I never did in Netflix's UI (any of their UIs).
Kodi's got some really weird UI choices going on. I don't think it's the case that Netflix-alike UIs are anywhere near equivalently bad, but people are able to use them anyway just due to familiarity. I think Kodi's is simply a lot worse.
Even the parts of Jellyfin that don't resemble Netflix (as there's no user-facing equivalent in Netflix)—the server & library management portions—I find vastly easier to use than Kodi's equivalents.
You need to reach for their inner cheap skates.
We got tons of people to use XMBC, even moms and similar.
But Kodi, Kodi even I couldn't figure out, Jellyfin + Infuse is bog simple.
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content.
1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to this day, I am not really confident about what it's going to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause? Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention which yes, is terrible.
2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work, awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?"
3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a file.
That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying enough for me to take the time to try something else like Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their web site what they offer that differentiates them from Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.
I run Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 4. I have the same complaints about it that you have.
And it is nice, I guess -- it's functionally simple to just play files over an SMB share. But the interface is... well, the interface was really amazing on the OG Xbox and that was a very long time ago.
So even though I keep Kodi around, most of my video-watching is with Plex, wherein: The library updates itself. The subtitles download themselves (the subtitles even theoretically sync themselves to the video). Stuff generally Just Works, even over the WAN.
Plex is very set-and-forget, and its performance is great on a ~$20 ONN streamer-box from Wal-Mart (and there's also smart TV apps and PC-oriented playback, of course).
The user experience is really good: The interface is very remote-centric and flows well while kicked back in an easy chair in front of a TV. My eldery, tech-averse dad uses Plex without any trouble, which he'd absolutely never be able to do with Kodi.
Amusingly, Plex is/was a fork XBMC. :)
Despite the complexities of its client-server model (where both sides are kind of fat), and the expense, I can't recommend Plex highly enough.
That said: Jellyfin is free both as in beer and as in libre. It also gets most of this stuff right, and from what I've read it's been improving steadily for a number of years. I'd have written about Jellyfin instead, but I don't have as much direct experience with it (and I paid for Plex a long time ago).
I run kodi via OSMC on a Vera V.
It comes with a dedicated remote (though it does support CEC), which solves #1, at the cost of having an extra remote.
I mainly hit #2 when scrubbing, often (worse on some compression types than others), it'll just freeze frame for a minute before everything catches up. This may be because I'm serving the content via HTTP to the Vera V, I've been meaning to try NFS and/or SMB. Never had issues with playback itself, probably because the Vera V hardware and the OSMC/Kodi build are co-developed, so there is pretty much always hardware decode support.
#3 surprised me; Kodi supporting just using my directory layout is why I use it over something like Jellyfin! I just added the HTTP share, and then navigate Videos->files->my_http_share_name and I'm in my directory structure.
1. Buy a FLiRC and use any remote of your choosing.
2. Are you running Kodi on a potato?
3. You can absolutely use Kodi without a media database.
Jellyfin's a media server first and foremost.
Out of the box, what you get is a server with (Optionally! But included by default in e.g. the Docker image, I think) an official web UI.
It's multi-user, has decent parental controls, automatic metadata fetching from a bunch of sources, can live-transcode when a client needs it (I have that disabled because my server is too weak, LOL), lots of good stuff.
You'll manage it through the Web UI, mostly. Set-top platform clients tend not to include much in the way of management features. (which is fine, it's way more pleasant to do that through a browser)
The web UI is also a Netflix-alike interface. Watch straight from the browser, if you like.
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The one major concession that puts some people off it is that it works butter smooth if your file naming conventions match what it expects, but it gets a lot less-pleasant if they don't. There are some minor variations allowed but mine's basically like:
For movies. This demonstrates naming for the movies themselves (in this case, three different cuts of the same movie), extra features (you can change the extra features folder name if you like; it may default to "featurettes" and I may have changed mine, can't recall for sure) and external subtitles. I think you can handle external audio files similarly, if you have any of that going on. There are also ways to categorize special features into like trailers or whatever, with directories, but I haven't bothered with that.I think there is a way to put your subtitles in a "subs" directory or something like that, but I don't do it. Then again I rarely keep more than two sub languages, maybe three or four total files if there are separate SDH options, for a given video. Usually just English and if it's a foreign film maybe the original language's subtitles (the French file for Apocalypse Now above is just an example, I didn't look at a real directory to write it)
For TV:
The naming on these is pretty flexible. Basically as long as it can find the series (the year helps a lot) and everything's got `sXXeXX` somewhere in it, it'll be fine. Spaces, dots, dashes, doesn't affect much. "asdf.s03e05 - Some Name (stuff in parens).mkv" will find TheTVDB's entry for season 3, episode 5 (even if the name and all that in the file name are wrong, doesn't matter, it ignores that). External subtitles work like for movies (just stick them alongside the video files)One pitfall: every now and then you find a case where DVD/BluRay and aired orders differ. TheTVDB usually records multiple orders in these cases. I dunno how to force Jellyfin to prefer one or the other, I just figure out which it's preferring (usually the one TheTVDB shows you on the Web by default, I think?) and adjust to that.
Also note that rarely (but sometimes for important cases, like e.g. Looney Tunes) TheTVDB uses years for the seasons. So you'll want "Season 1965" and such for those. No big deal, just a weird quirk of certain shows' metadata. Not that common.
I think you can name the "specials" directory to... specials, and maybe even give it an arbitrary name in the Jellyfin settings, but I like "Season 0" or "Season 00" (either works, prepended zeros are ignored, I have both hanging around) because it matches the special episode naming in TheTVDB (like "s00eXX").
In a pinch, you can override which IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB, et c. ID that Jellyfin decided belonged to the movie or TV show, using the web UI, and make it re-scrape the metadata. Usually it's better to figure out why it got it wrong and fix that instead—that way you don't even have to care about Jellyfin's database of scanned metadata, you can always just have it re-create it from scratch with little or no fuss. (and you can also set it to write the metadata alongside your shows and movies in files, like Kodi can)
I think there might be a way to put things like IMDB IDs directly in file names to make it even more clear what you mean, but "name (year)" has been so reliable for me I've never bothered to look into it.
I base my naming and years on what I find in the metadata sources themselves, usually IMDB and TheTVDB for me. Surprisingly often, Wikipedia disagrees with these, and sometimes [ahem] acquired files also have file names recording years that disagree with those sources. Usually it seems to be a festival-circuit vs. wide-release thing, as those often fall in different years. The metadata source should win, since otherwise it'll make auto-scanning worse.
Some people are really set on things like having their movies categorized in folders by director or whatever, and that doesn't work too well with Jellyfin.
(I know that file naming explanation is a lot, but it's really not that complicated in practice, and there are docs but I found there were some "but can I..." or "is it necessary to..." gaps in it for me that I've tried to fill in above)
DESPITE the impression probably given by all that text, I've found this one of the greatest parts of Jellyfin. Delete a file? After a couple minutes, it's gone from the UI. Add some files? In a couple minutes, they show up. (and you can force re-scans to speed it up). Slightly rename a file? But Jellyfin still reads it as the same movie from its metadata source? Your watch history survives. Hell I think you can even delete a movie, then add it again later, and your watch history survives (as long as Jellyfin decides it's the same movie by ID). There's no cruft that hangs around to deal with. It's very low-stress. Like 99% of my "management" of Jellyfin is just rsycing files, LOL.
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As for non-Web clients:
- There's an official Roku client, but... most Roku devices have pretty limited codec support. The client works great though. If your server can transcode, this may be a totally fine choice. It's what I used for quite a while until enough of my files were in formats newer than h.264 that it was no longer viable.
- AppleTV has an official client. It's pretty good, but... if you can't transcode, there's one somewhat-common Dolby audio format (I forget which exactly) that AppleTV doesn't have a license to, so it causes problems. However, for that problem there's:
- Infuse (also AppleTV). It's amazing. The recent release supports multiple user accounts with different server access settings (not only can they log into Jellyfin with different credentials, they could conceivably use totally different servers), which is brilliant if you want parental controls or just to have different "watched" lists. It's free but there's a paid version with a few extra features that includes a license to that tricky audio format. I've been using this for years, at this point, and aside from wishing it supported multiple accounts (and it does now, as of very recently!) I've had no trouble with it at all. Also, Infuse supports other media servers as backends.
There are clients for tons of other platforms, too. And you can always Airplay or whatever from (say) a laptop.
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For going on the road (and short of taking your server with you) I have used two options:
- You can just use it directly over a VPN to your house, like Tailscale, if the client end's connection is solid (and your home connection is good, for that matter). I've streamed mid-quality 4K over such an arrangement, halfway across the US. You can even connect an AppleTV to Tailscale and take the AppleTV with you (it's much smaller than most servers, lol) for the full at-home experience while traveling (Christmas movie marathon at the in-laws' house this holiday season?)
- Long road trip with the kids and want them to watch Apollo 13 (and perhaps a couple Disney movies) while you drive to Cape Canaveral? Browse your Jellyfin web UI on the tablet they'll use, and download the file(s) you want straight from there. Play files in VLC. Done, no internet connection required. Being able to use the web UI is nice because you can browse categories and such, it's actually a fair bit better than something like using an SFTP client.
If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic. IYKYK
Yeah that part was amazing. It was 2006, I'd softmoded the Xbox with the Splinter Cell hack. I had 2MBs ADSL capped @ 10GB for international data but unlimited national. I was in a NZ only private tracker to take advantage of that and then the icing on the cake, streaming the multi volume rar files straight to the TV. It really was magic.
Being able to play VIDEO_TS files directly blew my mind; no need to argue about compression with our massive 250 GB drives ... ;)
Oh yea - and DCC transfers for content from IRC. mmmmm
I still get comments along the lines of ‘remember when you had Netflix before Netflix? Man that was awesome, you could have made billions right?’ from former housemates and friends. I had XBMC in the living room connecting to my server which auto downloaded all the latest tv and movies. So to them i had something much better then Netflix well before Netflix got into online streaming.
100% Even when I stopped playing Xbox games, we would take that pimped out machine everywhere. Long before there was Netflix, there was an Xbox running XBMC loaded with movies and TV shows of questionable origins. Good times!
XBMP is the main reason I got my Xbox, it was fantastic. And later I even played a few games on it!
I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.
I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
Yes! So many streaming sources and high performance/responsiveness.
24 year old hardware that is not only useful but punches above most of the set-top boxes you'll find on Amazon. I also suspect that it could run Silksong or Balatro just fine.
Sure, it's unfair to compare gray/black market use cases, but it does make stark the hardware upgrade treadmill we've all been forced on.
You may need to remove your rose tinted glasses. No doubt it was incredible for its time but not even being able to play 1080p video puts it underneath most set top boxes you can get today.
Spec-wise, sure, but I suspect that if you ran a blind test between an Xbox running XBMC and an Amazon Fire Stick, most folks would prefer the XBMC experience (despite the 720p output).
I don't think Xbox had 1080p support? That would be somewhat annoying to be limited by.
1080i though
It could output analogue 720p and 1080i for sure, but the CPU had a hard time keeping up with HD video decoding. It was only a 733mhz Pentium 3 after all.
Although to go on a tangent, it turned out that you could swap the soldered BGA processor for a socketed 1.4ghz Pentium meant for a desktop PC, using an incredibly cursed interposer setup to redirect the CPU pins to the right BGA pads, and it somehow actually worked.
this is my goto for xbox gen1 HDMI - Electronxout[0]. Here's a full list of video options[1]
[0] https://electron-shepherd.com/products/electronxout
[1] https://www.xbox-scene.info/forums/topic/657-list-of-all-og-...
What problems are these widgets supposed to solve?
With such a widget: The video is still at most 720p or 1080i (because scaling, like cake, is a lie), it still originates as an analog signal (that's all the OG Xbox can provide), and the machine is still broadly incapable of playing high-definition video (it's too slow).
XMP was the first time I ever picked up a soldering iron -- so I could "hack" my OG Xbox 1.0.
I will always, always love and respect it. I love that they are still committed to the OG device. I want to pull mine out and see if the spinning hard drive still works after all these years, might even try to update it!
If you do go ahead and fire up your old Xbox, it would probably be worth you running XCAT.
> Xbox Content Archive Tool (XCAT) is a utility that runs directly on an Xbox console to assist in finding unarchived DLC and other lost content. When run, the application will scan the Xbox hard drive for any content that has yet to be archived and upload it directly to the servers of the XCAT Team for later analysis, sorting, and archival.
https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox:XCAT
Same. Executer mod chip?
I remember at its peak renting 5 games at a time from blockbuster, copying them to my Xbox in the parking lot and dropping the DvDs in the return box to confused employees inside who had just rung me up.
Dont think I played many of the games the real game was building the collection haha fond memories
That's what my dad used to mod our OG Xbox. My neighbor (unmodded) and I would split the Blockbuster Gamepass (I think that's what it was called) for $30/mo (IIRC) for unlimited rentals, just 1 at a time. We'd take it home, rip it to my Xbox then put the disk in his and we'd play through whatever the game was until we finished or got bored, then rinse and repeat.
Had I been able to drive at that time I would have tried to get the family van that had pull down TV (tiny) screen in it so I could do what you did.
Precarious hard drive IDE cable-swap-while-running gang here. Sitting there wondering if I was going to kill something with both the family PC splayed open on the dining room table and the Xbox splayed open on the dining room table, with a Linux live CD in hand…
I still can’t believe Bert would have ever cheated on Ernie[1].
[1] http://archiv.sega-dc.de/phoenix.maxconsole.net/docs/bertern...
People with the skills to design these things impress the hell out of me. The ability to reverse it to then understand it well enough to create these exploits are impressive.
Also, I hate fonts. My two least favorite parts of using computers are fonts and printers. Even in the old days of System 7-9 pre-OS X, fonts would prevent a system from booting. Many a times, I had to reboot without loading extensions, move out fonts, and then reboot because some font I just "borrowed" was corrupt. Even then, I was flabbergasted that a font could crash a computer. The more things change, the more they stay the same it appears.
That link just unlocked a core memory I haven't thought about since I was 17 years old, so thanks for that!
In the context of how that hack works, I'd argue that Bert and Ernie are working together to tag team the Xbox dashboard. Rather than cheating, seems broadly consensual to me, at least as far as Bert & Ernie are concerned.
Yep my electronics engineer dad was like "you cannot do this" but it worked! He got me to put an aligator clip wire from case to case so the grounding would at least be joined?
I remember that there were 2 games that you could use to modify your xbox but I only remember 1 game. Mechassault.
Mechassault, 007 Agent Under Fire and Splinter Cell.
More recently there are other game exploits, such as THPS4. However, since ENDGAME you don't even need a game to softmod.
I always wanted to mod mine, but was worried about Xbox Live ban (even on OG xbox)
This had me wondering what the name of the chip I intended to buy was ... which had me remembering then name Bennie Huang, which led me to realize the OG Xbox he modded is on display near me at the Henry Ford museum (!): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
> Not on exhibit to the public.
=(
I remember installing XBMC with a 360-style "blades" interface and being blown away by how much smoother and nicer it was then the blades interface on the Xbox 360 at the time.
Obviously the OS wasn't doing as much as an Xbox 360 was, but as an end user, it made me perpetually annoyed at what we "could have had" on the 360.
And then Microsoft changed the 360 UI to their windows 8 uwp Tile-style UI with even more ads and I realized that I underestimated how bad things could get.
Apparently the "blades UI" 360s are quite sought after. I wonder if any progress has been made on restoring the stock firmware. I never had one myself unfortunately, mine came preloaded with a later OS.
Those ancient 360s are probably doomed to hardware failure however. They didn't seem to fix the issues with the 360 being essentially disposable until very late in the release cycle.
Gotta love this:
> Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently.
As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years.
My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.
Yeah, the Pentium 2 and 3 CPUs were very capable. Even today I feel they can do a lot of work with the right tools and some shims to access modern stuff (SSH, RDP).
Maybe XBMC's kernel wasn't designed for multitasking and they're now adding better support. I could understand wanting to throw the whole CPU at whatever the user was doing, especially in early days.
I loved XBMC and still use Kodi to this day. Back then, I even proposed and POCed what's now a part of their Add-On system, essentially a fuse-like virtual file system forwarded to Python. Before that, each Add-On had to bring its own UI. This was basically my first OSS contribution and the community was really supportive and welcoming.
I used that to build my XM Radio Online plugin!
XBMC really takes me back. I used to love using this, and then when it switched to Kodi I got a bit confused but kept using it. Finally I moved over to Plex because I recall having some issues with Kodi i can't remember these days. But while I love Plex, i don't love the proprietary feeling of it, and would still prefer something truly open.
Jellyfin + Infuse on Apple TV has been quite wonderful. Jellyfin alone works fine if you have various other players.
I fondly remember opening up my Xbox to solder a mini board to the Xbox board. Later, they figured out how to add it without the additional board.
As much of an achievement as this is, I think much of the charm is sadly lost in later versions of XBMC.
Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!
I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.
A quick search shows me that there is an actively maintained version here https://github.com/jamal2362/skin.pm3-hd.cpm
That's some impressive dedication to continue homebrew on the OG Xbox in 2025. Much respect for that alone. Very cool to see such an old console get a first class modern media player experience.
There are still new hardware upgrades and add-ons being developed for the original Xbox. I myself contributed heavily to a new HDMI upgrade.
I didn't get consoles as a kid, but after moving out I bought my first console - a PS3 I jailbroke.
Showtime/Movian was my TV media player for years, actually worked pretty great until I got a Shield. Cool to see it is still being developed, like XBMC.
Should have named it XBMC 360 because it has come full circle and it would continue their barbaric culture of naming it 'X' but building it for the complementary set of X. (i.e. it works on everything but XBOX 360)