r v l . c o m

…or ‘I Want My, I Want My HDXBMC‘ (couldn’t decide which was catchier)

I just figured how to put my XMBC Media Centre in hi-def mode - and omg, the difference really is stunning! It’s almost like looking through a window, rather than watching a recording. Awsome.

Because I love internet How-To’s, here’s how I did it…

You will, of course need 1 x Xbox running XBMC. I saw new Xbox’s for sale for 80 euro recently. Add in a cheapish 20 euro router (ebay), a few cables and you can network your home and have HD video and digital audio for about eu$150. Seriously… how can you top that? Do it or I’ll slap you.

Then follow these 6 easy steps to see what all this HD fuss is about…

1. Get yourself a knock-off XBOX HD connector. I got mine on eBay for about US$20 from the ebay seller ‘gameinfinity’. Microsoft stopped making the Genuine ones a while ago apparently, so don’t feel guilty about this. You’re probably paying the wages of several pre-pubescent Asian factory workers.

1a. Wait impatiently for it to arrive in the mail. Send several, increasingly-shitty, emails to the supplier before realising things move slower in the real world.

2. When it arrives, connect a 3-pin audio/video cable (RCA?) to the BOX adapter, taking note of which colour plug goes into which port.

2a. Connect the other end of the 3-pin cable to your HD-capable TV (which was the main reason for buying my Philips 81cm LCD). The ‘BOX’ rip-off HD connector also has an optical audio-out plug, so if you have an optical audio cable lying around (the black cable in the photo), connect this also and hook up your surround sound stereo. This is NOT going to improve your popularity with your neighbours.

3. Download and burn the Enigmah PAL/NTSC Selector CD from here. Click on the little disc icon next to the program title to download the .rar file. Make a bootable disc (kind of waste of a blank dvd, but whatever) and start up your XBOX with this in the drive. This is necessary because the options for enabling HD video output are only available in NTSC mode. Before I realised this I was stuck at 720×500 resolution and the screen was flickering every 10 seconds.

4. There are only 4 options in the video selector program, press the button it says to change your Xbox to NTSC mode. There’s no option to save the change, so just change the mode, kill the box and reboot, taking the DVD out first. Your xbox should now be in NTSC mode - I couldn’t see any difference to PAL, but maybe that’s normal? I should also add that this program requires you to use the Xbox game controller, won’t work with the IR remote.

5. Now load the default Microsoft Xbox dash and go into the ‘video settings’ section. There should now be options asking ‘does your TV support 480i, 720i and 1080i. I don’t know what happens if you enable them all, but I wanted 720i or higher, so just enabled the 2nd and 3rd option. Reboot into XBMC.

6. Freak out over how much better it looks! All of a sudden the text and images of the OS are immeasurably smoother than before - its the equivalent of a high quality PC monitor, which I guess technically it really is. I tried to take a few images of the improvement (below) but its one of those need-to-see-to-appreciate things.

This is the ‘My Pictures’ section - showing all the albums I have stored on my laptop, where I use Picasa to organise and edit.

This would be the start-up or home screen. You can have scrolling RSS feeds and live weather info on this page. Still working on setting up email notification (what monkey on my back).

And finally this is the album-art view of the My Music section. This is basically my full iTunes library, stored on external NAS drive, but managed from my laptop in iTunes.