I’ve been using Xbox Media Center for a long time now, since I got my first Xbox chipped back in March 2004, and never really used it much. That Xbox became an emulator more than anything. I don’t know why, but I just decided yesterday to try out the latest version of XBMC to see how far things have moved on.

First, some background for those who don’t know: XBMC is a homebrew application that runs on modded Xboxes either as a basic application or a complete replacement for the standard Microsoft Dashboard. From within it you can run your Xbox games as normal, but also do almost everything that you’d expect from a full HTPC system.

It can play any format you can throw at it from the hard drive, disc, or streamed over a network – DVD, DivX, XviD, Quicktime, MPEG, WMV, MP3, AAC, etc, so that you can watch or listen to them on your TV. Even online streams and iTunes network shares can be played through it. The only features it lacks are the ability to burn DVDs and record television, and you can bet that if the Xbox hardware supported it those would be implemented in a heartbeat.

In did a complete reinstall of XBMC with the latest version, which was worlds ahead of the one I used to have. To test it out I sent a couple of gigs of assorted media over (mostly Quicktime and XviD videos, with a smattering of JPGs, WMVs, and MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music) and played around for a few hours. Everything, including HD videos with much higher resolutions than my TV, played flawlessly. Prerendered or not, seeing Killzone 2 running on a TV looked great.

One of the coolest features, and one that I didn’t even know existed until I stumbled onto it by accident, is the ability to stream from web pages. Included are scripts to let you view movie trailers direct from the Quicktime site, with the navigation implemented into the XBMC theme very nearly perfectly. You can also view any of GameSpot‘s video content in a GS-themed browser. It wasn’t quite as seamless as the Apple one, but seeing on-demand video reviews of new games is just too cool.

You honestly couldn’t tell that this was free software by looking at it. It’s more polished, feature filled, and works so well that I could easily justify spending the price of any other piece of Xbox software on it. You can’t help but feel that Microsoft missed the ball a little (or a lot) by barely including even the most basic of XBMC’s features in the standard Xbox, and the potential shown must have influenced the media functionality of the 360.

This is one amazing piece of open source software that I’m definitely going to be following the future progress of and, if I can’t afford a full HTPC by that time, I might use the 360 to play all my games and simply turn that Xbox into a media center. It’s really a great achievement.

Anyone who has read Slashdot will be very familiar with the rhetoric that Linux is on the verge of taking the desktop crown away from Windows, but also anyone who isn’t an open source zealot who has tried it will know that it still has a long way to go before it can touch Windows and OS X in the usability and overall polish stakes. Recently Ubuntu has become something of a cult within the cult, coming from nothing to being the most popular Linux distro in a little over six months by selling itself (or not selling itself, as the case may be) on the fact that it was “Linux for human beings”, so I got my hands on a bunch of the free CDs to try it out.

I’d never really thought of using anything other than OS X on my iBook so it was with some trepidation that I slid the live CD into the precious. The free CDs that you can order come in a nice card slipcase, each containing both the installation CD and the live CD so that you can test it out before installing, and it really makes the package look professional. Within a few minutes it had detected all my hardware (even the Microsoft Bluetooth mouse, and only the Airport card was unsupported) and booted from the CD into the full GNOME desktop. I’d previously only used KDE under Knoppix and was pleasantly surprised with how nice to use GNOME was.

Obviously a live CD is no way to test the speed of an operating system but performance on files that had been cached was nice and snappy. I messed around with Firefox and played a few rounds of the included Poker game while holding a few chats on Gaim and only recall a slight delay for the disc to spin up upon loading the programs for the first time.

I’d imagine that it would be as fast as can be expected of any OS when running from the HD, but I’m too careful with my iBook and its contents to try that. I might drop it onto one of the spare partitions on my Windows PC at some point but I haven’t even plugged that thing in since I switched to OS X.

Linux had seemed like something too esoteric and impenetrable to the beginner for me to think seriously about trying, but the developers of Ubuntu have done a fantastic job of making it very usable. Even though I admittedly I have more computer knowledge than the average person I still think it would be easy enough for most to use. I’m something of a pessimist in that I can’t see Linux ever becoming the dominant desktop OS platform, but this shows the potential of it to become a viable general use alternative for most with a few years of development. They have a stable and fast OS already, so with some more work on user-friendliness the saving of at least £80 on every PC you own starts to look better and better.