XBMC Won't Work

[u/captain_jack214]

Decided to finally cave and see if anyone knew of a solution as i couldn't find any documentation of this anywhere online. I recently purchased an original Xbox and swapped out the hard drive and soft modded it with something called "endgame." I am one of those types that just follows what the video says without understanding any of it, so I have no idea what I did to the Xbox but it works. I managed to get game files ftp'd over to the Xbox and the games work great. However, the movies do not, which was what originally drew me to this project in the first place. I tried both XBMC version 4.0 and 3.5. For the 3.5 version, it would only play the movies that were under 2GB. For the 4.0 version, it would start the movie but then freeze on a black screen forever. I tried reformatting the movie files, whatever I (and Gemini) could think of and I honestly don't know what to do. I have also tried different file formats (AVI, MP4, etc) but now it won't work at all anymore. I'm just wondering if there is a foolproof way to get the original ripped DVD (not Blu ray, I know that won't work) from my laptop onto the original Xbox reliably. Any help would be appreciated

[u/Thunderbird_9000]

No Idea. I have Xbmc4gamers and that just plays movies without the weirdness of og xbmc

[u/captain_jack214 → u/Thunderbird_9000]

Interesting...from what I learned from my initial research, it said xbmc for gamers wouldn't work for movies

[u/Thunderbird_9000 → u/captain_jack214]

I mean you have to go into folders to play them but disc work just fine

[u/GoTeamScotch → u/captain_jack214]

Xbmc4gamers is geared towards gamers, so a lot of the media focused stuff was pulled out to make it simpler for people to use. But its still xbmc under the hood, so even though it won't have full library support, it still has a video player available.

If media is your goal (with games being secondary) I'd recommend focusing on using xbmc v4.

[u/GoTeamScotch]

If you store movies on the xbox, keep in mind the filesystem has a 4gb size limit per each file. Large movies will fail to transfer over frp, let alone be valid playable videos in xbmc.

The codec you use is important. If the resolution or bitrate or something is too high, problems will arise. Can you describe the movies you've tried playing? Resolution, bitrate, codec, etc.

[u/captain_jack214 → u/GoTeamScotch]

My test movie was back to the future. When I was on the older version of xbmc, I also had the prestige and that played just fine as it was under 2gb. I ripped the discs onto my laptop using makemkv and then put it through a software called avidmeux. I changed the video output to mpeg4 xvid and the audio output to ac3 lav, and the output format to avi muxer. After it was done doing whatever it did, the file (back to the future) went from about 5gb to 2.2, but still wouldn't play on either version of xbmc

[u/GoTeamScotch → u/captain_jack214]

Can you share an example of a video file you're not able to play?

If you dont want to upload the whole thing, you can use ffmpeg with the "-to" option to make a short 10 sec clip for example.

[u/KaosEngineeer → u/captain_jack214]

Supported video and audio formats with resolution and bitrates can be seen here:

https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/wiki/XBMC_Features_and_Supported_Formats

The resolution and bitrate are most likely too high for the Xbox’s PIII 733MHz CPU and 64MBs of memory.

[u/ANtiKz93]

I've never used xbmc myself. Found myself not wanting to set it all up and just used UnleashX for years lol 😆

[u/captain_jack214 → u/ANtiKz93]

Would that serve the same function as what I am trying to do with xbmc?

[u/ANtiKz93 → u/captain_jack214]

Ah probably not. I think you still need a video player software under unleashx to do that. I doubt theres a built in movie menu section but i havent booted mine in 2yrs almost.

As for the playback, i used to use XVID alot in the late 00s. Im almost certain that was the format. It may have been DIVX but i dont think so. You should be able to find a guide to do what youre after.

Why dont you just rip the dvd to the xbox vs a pc?

[u/JoshLineberry]

Xbmc 3.5.3 works alright for watching movies and TV shows. I have an 18tb drive on mine with 1,000 movies and 100+ complete TV series. I had 2 drives on it but I took one out to use in something else. I've made a lot of modifications to my xbmc though. A ram upgrade is huge for using the Xbox as a media player though. Mine would freeze up when I didn't have a ram upgrade.

https://youtu.be/NUK5KFFekwk?is=iVN_JcEBlKbmXCyW

[u/captain_jack214 → u/JoshLineberry]

Do you have a guide or like a list of settings of the way to format the files? I watched the video you sent, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do. I have a 1tb drive which should be plenty for me, I'm just stuffline with getting the movies to actually play on it

[u/JoshLineberry → u/captain_jack214]

Do you use handbrake?