Why use your Xbox as a piddly little media extender for Windows Media Center when you could turn your video game console into a full fledged media center PC in its own right? That's the raison d'etre of Team-XBMC, the makers of the Xbox Media Center.

The Xbox Media Center can play music, videos, and pictures from the original Xbox console's hard drive, DVD drive, a USB flash drive, your home network, or the internet. But when it comes right down to it, the media center's just too cool and useful to be confined to a single hardware platform, so a group of the developers are busy porting it to run on any Linux machine. And they're asking for help.

If you have experience programming with C/C++ and have time to volunteer, you can contact the developers directly.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

The Xbox 360 Spring 2007 update rolled out this week. There's been a lot of attention given to the integration of MSN Messenger and support for 1080p MPEG4 and H.264 video. But it looks like the media extender capability's been tweaked (a little) as well.

If you think of your Xbox 360 first and foremost as a way to access content on your Windows Media Center PC, and secondly as a gaming device, you might want to boot into the media extender interface very time you press the power button. Now you can.

Of course, when it comes right down to it, this isn't that exciting. If you have a media center remote, you could always have just pressed the green button to load the media extender when your Xbox 360 powers up. But if you're a bit old fashioned and like walking over to the box to turn it on, now you can.

[via Aaron Stebner]

The AppleTV just started shipping this week and there are already at least two major user-initiated upgrades that seem to work. You can swap out that 40GB hard drive for a roomy 120GB or larger drive, and you can reportedly add support for DivX and Xvid video codecs.

If you're curious what's inside Apple's latest box, our friends at Engadget have taken a peek at the AppleTV's innards.

Orb has been a great utility for streaming audio, video, and pictures from your PC to pretty much any machine with a web browser. We've already told you about how you can use Orb to (sort of) turn your PS3 or Wii into a media extender.

But what about an Xbox 360? This week, Orb added support for that console as well. Sure, the 360 is already designed to be a media extender. But it's always nice to have choices, right?

With the PS3 and Wii, you have to use Orb's web interface. Xbox 360 users just have to make sure their console is connected tot heir LAN. Then all you do is go tot he media tab in your Xbox 360, select the media type you want to play (music, video, or photo), click "computer," and select the PC you want to stream content from.

[via EngadgetHD]