[rudedog]

Just seen this posted over at xboxhackers.net

Xbox Media Center, The new (ad)venture
XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) is a new free open source (GPL) multimedia player for Microsoft's Xbox. XboxMediaCenter is still in beta stage but can currently be used to play and view most video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG/MPG, VOB, AVI, OGM, DivX, XVID, MP3, OGG, JPG, GIF and many more direct from a CD/DVD in the DVD-ROM or of the Xbox build-in hard disk drive, it can also play files over a network (LAN) from a PC via an "XStream Server" application or from a Windows (SMB) share. It has playlist + slideshow functions and ability to funcion as a full replacement Xbox dashboard. These and more features enables the Xbox running XboxMediaCenter to fully function as a multi-media jukebox. XboxMediaCenter also known as "Xbox Media Center" or simply "XBMC".
This project is what the active official Xbox Media Player developers has been working on in secret for the last 4-6 months. This does not mean the Xbox Media Player is dead, official and unofficial developers will still be adding new code and maintain it but the lead developers will be focusing on XBMC. Remember that XBMC and XBMP are hobby projects and are only developed by volunteers in their spare-time for free.
New and big differences compared to XboxMediaPlayer:
- Entire new fully skinnable GUI engine
- Easy switching between skins (if exist)
- Dynamic loader for multiple cores/engines
- Music database with search feature
- Sort files/folders by name, size or date
- File Manager for DVD-ROM/HDD/Network
- Virtual Keyboard
- CDDB and album cover/info lookup
- Movie calibration per resolution
- UI calibration
Things that are not supported in XBMC yet:
- DVD-movie playback
- Audio Visualization
- Matroska file container
- Windows DLL's (WMV/WMA 9)
- FTP-Server
- SHOUTcast
- TV-Guide
Note! Normal retail Xbox's require a modchip with hacked a BIOS for XboxMediaCenter to run.
Official website: htp://www.xboxmediacenter.com
Official Mirror: http://www.xboxmediacenter.de

[ED!]

MICROSOFT is gonna drop this like a sack of bricks. They better have ALL their bases covered.