Using and soft mod Xbox (my experiences, not for piracy ^^)
 

So I recently decided to buy an original Xbox and soft mod it, it was actually quit simple to do ^^.

I did it as I have found no good DIVX capable DVD players and found XBMC to instead. All the divx players out their either use the ESS or similar chipset and don’t decode in progressive scan well. The Xbox does a wonderful job doing decoding of almost every codec and container format. Plus I can watch all my subtitles as my TV set has horrible over scan that I had to install via the service menu to get rid of some geometric distortions. The thing upscales into 480p and 720 wonderfully. Also I can watch tuff on samba compatible shares ^^.

Though I have a few questions, who has done this and tried h.264? I am running the latest build of XBMC but it stutters or lags a lot, anyone having the same probs? The other problem is that I cannot set the HD flags properly in the XBOX as I cant write to eeprom in the soft modded dash (all that I have tried) I have to reinstall ms dash and do it their. For some reason I cant boot a legal version of panzer without the TV going out of sync unless i have the hdtv flags disabled. my tv works fine at 480 p and 720p / 1080i in toher games and XBMC

I was under the impression that H.264 was a more computationally-intensive codec and that a 700MHz proc didn't have quite the muscle to decode it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I know my 867MHz G4 struggles to play back some H.264 video. 1.8GHz Athlon64 in my laptop can handle it, though.

A softmodded Xbox is pretty badass, yeah. I decided to give it a go last week. I booted XBMC and thought "oh, this is pretty cooHOLY SHIT ALL MY PORN IN 1 PLACE"

So now my Xbox is the ultimate fapping machine.