This guide is fairly lengthy so prepare to either be mind numbingly bored or twitching with anticipation. What I am about to detail is a method you can use to send any movie to any room in your house or even your neighbours house along with music and photos. Other features include web radio, web based movie previews, weather information and so much more. I am not the creator of XBMC nor any of the components you will put together - I am simply somebody who has put all these snippets of information together to form a single source of information. I have carried out a lot of research and tons of trial and error to get to this point and I think it is important that you understand a few things from the outset.
Streaming movies across a network is extremely intensive on your network resources. I highly recommend that you provide a single 100mbps physical network connection for each 'zone' you are going to have. You need to think about what you want to do before you do it and then compile your shopping list. Here is a diagram of what I have done in my own home:
To achieve all of the above - here is my recommendation for a shopping list:
| Each Zone | 1 Xbox | Price $149.99 |
| 1 Mod Chip (I recommend Team Xecuter X3 chip) You can buy them from Divineo | Price $59.99 | |
| 1 Xbox DVD Remote Control | Price $29.99 | |
| 1 x Cat5 Crossover Cable | Around $9.99 | |
| Each System
|
1 Quad port HP/Compaq NC3134 with an NC3135 daughterboard Ethernet card for the first two Xbox's (Zones) - this provide 4 physical network ports and then an NC3134 network card for an additional 2 zones, followed by an NC3135 for a further 2 zones. Additional zones after this you should keep on buying the NC3134 for the first two and then the NC3135 for the next two. The NC3135 is a daughter board card which plugs onto the back of the NC3134 which is the one that plugs into the PCI card of your pc | Around $30 - try ebay first. |
| A computer: go for at least a PentiumIII 1Ghz Cpu with 256mb Ram and a decent DVD Rom (Does not have to be a burner). Make sure your motherboard has plenty of PCI slots. Depending on how many movies you want to store - you could skip the Adaptec SATA solution and buy a motherboard with about 4 SATA plugs onboard. With this you want to put your operating system on an IDE drive (10gb will be more than enough). Add your SATA drives for your media storage - 250gb disks run around $140 now, use Western Digital if you can since they got a good review in their Sata lineup. Hitachi got the lowest due to their disks using excessive cpu. | Around $500 | |
| Storage: This is where things can get expensive. What
you must do though is decide how many movies you want to store on your
central library and do your maths from there. On average a movie
ripped from a DVD without doing any compression is 4gb. Personally
I do not bother to compress outside of DVDShrink since you lose quality,
so be safe and figure on 4gb per movie. If you can compress your
movies to a smaller size and be happy with the quality then all the more
movies you can store.. but if you are just getting started then I highly
suggest you think big - anything else is a bonus. My choice for storage outside of my pair of Compaq 4100 Fibre attached SCSI 15'000RPM Sans (complete overkill - but something I bought for another project a while back which became redundant) would definitely be the Adaptec hybrid. Go for the 16 port card - can can always add more disks, but buying a smaller capacity card and then having to upgrade will be an expensive lesson!
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| 1 Adaptec Serial ATA Raid 21610SA - 16 channel sata raid adapter | $600 | |
| 1 Supermicro 4 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure for every 4 SATA disks you buy | $130 | |
| 187 Movies | 4 Sata disks at 250Gb for 750Gb of data in a Raid5 array | $600 |
| 437 Movies | 8 Sata disks at 250Gb for 1'750Gb of data in a Raid5 array | $1200 |
| 687 Movies | 12 Sata disks at 250Gb for 2'750Gb of data in a Raid5 array | $1800 |
| 937 Movies | 16 Sata disks at 250Gb for 3'750Gb of data in a Raid5 array | $2400 |
| Software | XBMC | Freeware |
| DVD Shrink | Freeware | |
| Operating System for your central file server | ? | |
| Optional - nice to have wireless control system | ||
| 1 x Wireless router like a Linksys G | $50 | |
| Progear web tablet | $400 |
So now you have all of your shopping done.. what next? Well you need to open up your xbox, put the mod chip inside, install a new bios, ftp the xbmc software over to the xbox, configure your xml file, connect it to your storage server and then sit back and relax.. I have put a tutorial together which is basically an accumulation of all of the things I have found on the internet.. I am not the author of any of these sections and I will provide links and 'mentions in despatches' to all for they have contributed massively to the following... so let's get on with the meaty stuff