I know there was some MIT kid in the news a few months ago for hacking it in some manner. And there are some chips available, but I dunno if they're just for playing pirated games. And some people are working on a Linux distribution for it. But it's pretty much a gray area for me since I haven't been paying attention.

So my question is basically what can you currently do with an Xbox, and how difficult is it to do it? What I'm specifically interested in is either being able to replace the harddrive and play mp3s from it, playlists and all, or use it to play mp3s from another computer. Is this yet possible, and if not when will it be?

Please keep any warez discussion out of this thread, thanks.

chips, yes.

linux, yes. windows 95, yes. copied games, homebrew games, every emulator in creation, media player, bigger hard drives, more hard drives, playing games directly off the hard drive, etc, etc, etc...

basically, there's countless things this box will do, and it's still early.

this guy shows how he had 4 hard drives totalling 411gb!!:

http://208.34.209.68/411gb/

I was afraid of that...

So to do pretty much anything I'm going to have to order a modchip?

yes

Aghama, I have some friends on campus that our doing some things like you want to w/o a mod chip. I'll look into it. I'll try and get ahold of them during the weekend.

Just to clarify, I meant I was afraid that I was going to have to buy an Xbox soon, a modchip is no biggie.

Though it looks like the Xbox Media Player doesn't support playlists yet...in fact, it doesn't even support continuous play. Maybe it's not quite time.

I know one of my friends said her brother in Texas was somehow getting more harddrive space (sounds a lot like what mkdevo is talking about) and he can just go rent games and download them onto the xbox and have them to play whenever he wants. So he joined that Blockbuster thing and just rented 2 games a day till he had them all.

The whole Region 2 DVD player thing is another nice xbox feature that I'll be taking advantage of pretty soon here I hope.

~Scheherazade

www.xboxhacker.net

The scary thing to me about that mod is what MS decides to do with it in the future in terms of game and XBL compatability. It does a lot of good things, but unfortunately the asses have to ruin it for the rest of us.

I only want a DVD region hack and hopefully that region X disc thing will work or someone will release a dongle that will do the trick...

Sony tried that with a couple PSX games, but I don't think it lasted very long. But regardless, a $250 mp3 receiver (after modchip and remote) is well worth the money to me regardless of if future games work or not.

It can play MP3s out of the box - it'll rip em straight off a CD and your playlist is the order in which you rip em. You can have several song collections. It has a built-in player in the menu. Maybe I don't understand your question. Yes it has been hacked to pieces, but the thing you're specifically interested in is part of its original function and you don't need to modify it. As for the rest of that stuff - yeah you need a mod chip (for now).

I have 400 CDs ripped as mp3s on my hard drive. I want to play them with the Xbox because then I'd be getting an mp3 receiver with on screen display for a great price.

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-935092.html

here's a news article about the "XBOX Media Player"

Mp3s? Or just music? I always thought it couldn't handle mp3s... If it can I have a lot of stuff to rip to the hard drive.

I'm pretty sure the Xbox uses wma's, for obvious reasons.

Here's the previous Xbox HD thread:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...readid=183000&

Doesn't this pretty much do everything you'd want?

http://www.qcast.com/qcast.html

Total cost would be just over $300 if you want the remote as well.

belboz - homina homina homina

I think once I find a network adapter, this is going to be my answer. $100 ain't bad at all.

Haven't seen anything recently on it, but from what I recall, there's a pretty good chance that Xbox Live won't work on hacked machines. Don't think MS would be that stupid -- IIRC it searches for the correct, original BIOS and all that. Course if someone has a modded machine and is already Live, who knows.

Tuan Jim

Some people who have hacks, reported going online with XBOX Live, at least in other forums I've read.

To rip MP3s, you just need to burn the files on a CD-RW instead of a CD-R. That goes for copied CDs as well. It won't rip off a CD-R, but it will off a CD-RW.

~Scheherazade

Is there any kind of consensus about what Mod chip to purchase in terms of the number of
features supported? Is ther any place that compares different Mod chips?

I may have to buy one of these.

For everything you would like to know about the xbox hacking scene, look no further than xbox scene

My copy of qcast arrived today. I'll maybe start a new thread discussing it if I think there will be interest.

I'd be interested in hearing about it.