Xbox Media Player

Last updated February 24, 2019

Xbox Media Player, (or XBMP for short), now obsolete, was the predecessor to XBMC and XBMC4Xbox, a feature-rich free and open source media player for the Xbox (console). With an audio/video-player-core based on MPlayer, it allowed owners of a modified Xbox to display pictures and movie files, as well as play music files from the Xbox DVD-ROM drive, built-in harddisk drive, LAN (SMB) or the Internet.

XBMC4Xbox is a free and open source media player software made solely for the first-generation Xbox video-game console. The software was forked from the XBMC project after XBMC removed support for the Xbox console. Other than the audio / video playback and media center functionality, XBMC4Xbox also has the ability to catalog and launch original Xbox games, and homebrew applications such as console emulators from the Xbox's built-in harddrive.

Xbox (console) 2001 video game console by Microsoft

The Xbox is a home video game console and the first installment in the Xbox series of consoles manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, followed by Australia, Europe and Japan in 2002. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market. It is a sixth generation console, and competed with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. It was also the first console produced by an American company since the Atari Jaguar ceased production in 1996.

MPlayer free and open source media player

MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using DJGPP is also available. Versions for the Wii Homebrew Channel and Amazon Kindle have also been developed.

History

The Xbox Media Player Project was founded by d7o3g4q (also known as duo) and RUNTiME.^[1] It started out as two separate players, with the two developers each working on their own design and code. After sharing code and coordinating features to not duplicate efforts, by XBoxMediaPlayer beta 5 the two players were merged. The development and beta-testing was done "behind closed doors" for this project (d7o3g4q and RUNTiME promising that when version 1.0 was made they would release the source code to the public). After beta 6 was completed there were complaints from a lot of people as to why the developers did not release the source code for the player sooner as they were using FFmpeg and XVID code which are under the (L)GPL license. Even though the project was closed d7o3g4q and RUNTiME released the source code for beta 6 on the October 15, 2002.

In the November 2002, another software developer nicknamed Frodo who was the founder of "YAMP - Yet Another Media Player" joined the Xbox Media Player team and the XBoxMediaPlayer and YAMP projects were merged, the first release of the merged projects was called "Xbox Media Player 2.0" and the source code for it was released on December 14, 2002. XBoxMediaPlayer 2.0 was a complete re-write using a new core based on the MPlayer project, still using FFmpeg/XVID codec code. On December 28, 2002, the source code of XBoxMediaPlayer 2.1 was released with many bug fixes and a couple of new features such as true AC3 5.1 output, volume normalizer/amplification and an additional post processing filter. Two weeks later on January 12, 2003, XBoxMediaPlayer 2.2 source code was released with new features including dashboard mode to launch other Xbox applications/games, separate national language files, streaming media from windows file shares (SMB), audio-playlist, the ability to play media on-the-fly from ISO9660-Mode1 CDs and Windows DLL support for WMV 7,8, and 9. Xbox Media Player development stopped on December 13, 2003.

Running XBMP

XBMP requires a modchip or software exploit/hack installed in/on the Xbox to run, as it is not an authorized (a.k.a. "signed") Microsoft product. XBMP can be run as an application, or a dashboard that appears directly when the Xbox is turned on (though it takes around 15 seconds to load fully).

A modchip is a small electronic device used to alter or disable artificial restrictions of computers or entertainment devices. Modchips are mainly used in video game consoles, but also in some DVD or Blu-ray players. They introduce various modifications to its host system's function, including the circumvention of region coding, digital rights management, and copy protection checks for the purpose of using media intended for other markets, copied media, or unlicensed third-party (homebrew) software.

Microsoft U.S.-headquartered technology company

Microsoft Corporation (MS) is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. As of 2016, it is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies. The word "Microsoft" is a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software". Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

Legality

Although XBMP is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is written for use with Microsoft's XDK and so is not legally available as an executable program to non-official Microsoft game-publishers. Users are encouraged to compile their own binaries from the public CVS repository using the XDK, rather than downloading a questionable illegally released executable. XBMP's full source code is however legal 'as is' and is available on SourceForge.

The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. The license was originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project, and grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The GPL is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD licenses and the MIT License are widely used examples. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use.

The Xbox Development Kit (XDK) is a software development kit created by Microsoft used to write software for the Xbox gaming system. The XDK includes libraries, a compiler, and various tools used to create software for the Xbox. The XDK has the option to integrate itself into Microsoft Visual Studio 2002 or 2003. This is needed if one wants to develop applications or games for the Xbox. The XDK also includes a tool to record in-game footage, which has been widely used to create high-quality screenshots and trailers.

In computing, executable code or an executable file or executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions," as opposed to a data file that must be parsed by a program to be meaningful.

Related Research Articles

Xvid is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.

FFmpeg is a free software project consisting of a vast software suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the FFmpeg program itself, designed for command-line-based processing of video and audio files, and widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects, and standards compliance. FFmpeg includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by many commercial and free software products, libavformat (Lavf), an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the core ffmpeg command line program for transcoding multimedia files. FFmpeg is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1+ or GNU General Public License 2+.

The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.

ffdshow is an open source unmaintained codec mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. It is free software released under GNU General Public License 2.0, runs on Windows, and is implemented as a Video for Windows (VFW) codec and a DirectShow filter.

FAAC or Freeware Advanced Audio Coder is a software project which includes the AAC encoder FAAC and decoder FAAD2. It supports MPEG-2 AAC as well as MPEG-4 AAC. It supports several MPEG-4 Audio object types, file formats, multichannel and gapless encoding/decoding and MP4 metadata tags. The encoder and decoder is compatible with standard-compliant audio applications using one or more of these object types and facilities. It also supports Digital Radio Mondiale.

libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.

Gnash is a media player for playing SWF files. Gnash is available both as a standalone player for desktop computers and embedded devices, as well as a plugin for several browsers. It is part of the GNU Project and is a free and open-source alternative to Adobe Flash Player. It was developed from the gameswf project.

Video Acceleration API is a royalty-free API as well as its implementation as free and open-source library (libVA) distributed under the MIT License.

Boxee was a cross-platform freeware HTPC software application with a 10-foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living-room TV that enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social network services and interactive media related features. Boxee was originally a fork of the free and open source XBMC media center software which Boxee used as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.

A demultiplexer for digital media files, or media demultiplexer also called a file splitter by laymen or consumer software providers, is software that demultiplexes individual elementary streams of a media file, e.g., audio, video, or subtitles and sends them to their respective decoders for actual decoding. Media demultiplexers are not decoders themselves, but are format container handlers that separate program streams from a file and supply them to their respective audio, video, or subtitles decoders.

Libav is a free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data.

mpv is media player software, based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It is free and open-source software released under a mix of licenses including GNU General Public License version 2 or later (GPLv2+), with parts under GNU Lesser Public License version 2.1 or later (LGPLv2.1+), and some optional parts under GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).

Crystal HD is the Broadcom's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding.

References

↑ Team-XBMC (2008-02-22). "XBMC Project History as described by Team-XBMC themselves". xbmc.org. Archived from the original on 2008-02-17. Retrieved 2008-02-22.

External links

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[1] Team-XBMC (2008-02-22). "XBMC Project History as described by Team-XBMC themselves". xbmc.org. Archived from the original on 2008-02-17. Retrieved 2008-02-22.