XBMC has had its first major update since 2016 and has officially been released for the Original Xbox. This 4.0 update brings modern Kodi features and the Estuary interface to the classic 2001 console, which means development restarted on a piece of hardware that’s over two decades old.
If you’ve been a fan of tech for a while, you’ll remember just how important the Original Xbox was to the home media scene. Its architecture was so close to a typical PC of the time that the console proved incredibly hackable.
One of the earliest and most successful homebrew projects was Xbox Media Center, or XBMC. This software eventually grew so powerful that it outgrew the Xbox entirely, leading to its evolution into Kodi in 2014. Even Plex traces its roots back to an early Mac port of XBMC. I would say the legacy of this project alone makes its revival fascinating, as the Original Xbox genuinely helped shape how we consume streaming media today.
The most noticeable improvement in XBMC 4.0 is the introduction of the Estuary user interface. If you’ve used Kodi anytime since 2017, you’ll recognize Estuary immediately. It gives a clean, modern layout that makes navigation much snappier and easier to read compared to the older skins the Xbox version was stuck with.
Bringing this modern skin to the classic hardware wasn’t simple, though. The developers had to update the underlying GUIlib engine, which is the framework that handles the visuals. This means that backporting other modern skins in the future should be a much simpler process. Firing up a console from the early 2000s and seeing an interface that looks identical to what you’d download onto your PC today feels like total magic.
The new version does much more than just look pretty, though. It restores full functionality to online metadata scrapers for movies and television shows. This lets you build media libraries complete with box covers, plot summaries, and cast listings retrieved directly from the internet. The console remains surprisingly capable for its age, still supporting video playback up to 720p resolution.
For music lovers, the focus on high-quality audio output remains, with support for lossless codecs like FLAC and compatibility with visually immersive audio visualizers, including the classic MilkDrop. The games library system also received an upgrade. This update lets you browse your game collections with full artwork and descriptions, transforming the simple list into a polished, organized library.
If you’re into console modification, the longstanding support for trainers stays, giving you the option to apply gameplay modifications to titles right from the media center interface. Considering the Original Xbox runs on a single-threaded 733MHz CPU, performance is always a tightrope walk. However, the developers implemented improvements to task scheduling and multitasking in XBMC 4.0. This is a huge deal because it lets activities like background library updates and metadata scraping run concurrently while you navigate the interface.
You’ll also see an even smoother experience if you upgraded your consoles with extra RAM, CPU upgrades, or modern SSDs, as XBMC 4.0 is designed to take advantage of that extra horsepower. This new update is a powerful revival of a platform many thought was finished back in 2016. If you’ve still got your original hacked Xbox tucked away, you can grab the nightly builds and source code right now from the project’s GitHub repository and start reliving the early days of home media.
Source: Xbox-scene via Hackaday
