History of Kodi

Xbox Media Player, (or XBMP for short), was the predecessor to Xbox Media Center (XBMC), a feature-rich open source media player for the Xbox. With a 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.

Note! The XBMP project has been discontinued/abandonded and have been fully replaced by its successor, Xbox Media Center (XBMC), created by the same development team.

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, (it takes appox 15-seconds to fully load).

History

The XboxMediaPlayer project was founded by two software developers nicknamed d7o3g4q (a.k.a. duo) and RUNTiME. It started out as two separate players by the two original developers each working on their own design d7o3g4q's player was called XboxMediaPlayer and RUNTiME's player was called XBPLAYER, they began by sharing some code and coordinating features to not duplicate efforts and by XboxMediaPlayer beta 5 the two player where totally integrated into one. In beta 5 they also started using FFMPEG as the video codec and in beta 6 they also added XVID support vith code from the XVID project. 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, but after beta 6 was done there where a lot of complains from a lot of people why the developers did not release the source code for the player sooner as they where 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 15th of October 2002. In the November 2002 another software developers nicknamed Frodo (the founder of "YAMP - Yet Another Media Player") joined the Xbox Media Player team as the XboxMediaPlayer and YAMP projects merged, the first release of the merged projects was called "Xbox Media Player 2.0" and the source code for it was release on the 14 December 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 the 28 December 2002 the source code of XboxMediaPlayer 2.1 was released with many bug fixes and a couple of new features like true AC3 5.1 output, volume normalizer/amplification and an additional postprocessing filter. Two weeks later on the 12 of January 2002 XboxMediaPlayer 2.2 source code was released with new features like dashboard mode to lanuch other Xbox applications/games, separate national language files, streaming media from windows file shares (SMB), audio-playlist, playing media on-the-fly from ISO9660-Mode1 CD's and Windows DLL support for WMV 7,8,9.

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.

External links

• XboxMediaPlayer (XBMP) official website
• [http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmp/ XboxMediaPlayer (XBMP) official SourceForge.net project (closed, see Xbox Media Center)
• XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) official website