I have an original XBox purchased at Christmas time in 2001. It’s long out of warrantee. Something happened to the operating system and it stopped working. I looked around the Internet and found there were many modifications and replacement OS’s for the XBox. I figured anything was worth a shot because the old thing was just collecting dust.
I found this thing called the XBox Media Center and it has made my old XBox the most useful thing I have ever connected to my TV. I now have a media center. Since the XBox has an ethernet connection, and the ability to connect to the Internet and other devices in my house, I can access everything from the TV and play it through the surround sound system.
All of my music is MP3′ed on my home server. Now I can connect to the server via the XBox and play all that music on the good stereo. I can also capture live television with my streaming server (that was a project from a few years ago) and watch the digitized video through the XBox.
All my pictures are on the home server. The XBox can do a slide presentation of those right on the TV as well.
It even has an RSS feed that picks up news and the weather… right on the TV. The picture was captured by pressing the left thumb stick on the XBox controller. It has a build-in screen capture utility. The backend permits FTP connection so anything can be retrieved from the XBox.