I soft-modded my X-Box tonight and am currently listening to an album in MP3 located on a network share on an external hard drive in my den from the comfort of my living room as I type this.

I used the Mech Assault hack to get the Evolution X dashboard installed, and then just FTP’d over the software for X-Box Media Center.

Reading the instructions X-Box Scene seemed daunting. 30 steps, downloading this file and that file, modifying files, etc. In reality, it was just a few steps:

  1. Plug in the memory card into a controller and turn the X-Box on
  2. Copy the MechAssault save file from the controller to the hard drive
  3. Reboot the X-Box with MechAssault and load the savegame which starts the softmod installer
  4. Follow the instructions, including backup your files, and Evolution X is installed
  5. Go to a PC and download the X-Box Media Center file and extract it
  6. Edit one file and follow the instructions in the notes of the file
  7. Look at your IP address on the X-Box dashboard and go to a PC. FTP in to your X-Box
  8. FTP all the XBMC files to your apps directory on your modded X-Box
  9. Reboot the X-Box. From the Evolution X dashboard, choose Applications and choose X-Box Media Center

Voila – you’re running XBMC. I went in to Music, chose look over the network, chose my Buffalo Terrastation’s workgroup, and 30 seconds later was listening to Liz Phair – and it automatically uploads the songs you’re listening to Last.fm, which I mentioned in the blog a week or two ago.

It’s pretty slick – the UI is fantastic, the applications and formats XBMC supports is impressive, and the performance is blowing away the experience I had using Microsoft’s Media Center Extender for X-Box.

I have some research to do to see if I can automount samba shares (which could be really slick when I have MythTV working later) but for now automounting music and photo’s would make me very happy.