xBox Media Center IR On/Off Hack

We’re huge fans of xBox Media Center here at Automated Home, and with 2nd hand boxes available for around £40 theses days it really is the media player bargain of the century. One little problem is the lack of an IR controlled On/Off facility for the system, but now UK Home Automation mailing list old timer, and serial moder Quinten Uijldert has blogged his installation of the XIR Easy Kit which fixes this issue… “The original XBox makes, after a great games console, a fantastic versatile media player with the help of Xbox Media Center, or XBMC. You will need to chip or softmod your XBox (there are a million guides/opinions on the internet of which one is best) and a copy of the XBMC application. To fully appreciate XBMC, you also need to buy the DVD playback kit which allows you to control the XBox using a remote control. The only problem is that Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided that it doesn’t need the facility to switch the XBox on remotely. As we are a generation of couch potatoes that is obviously not on! Various solutions have been invented, but by far the easiest and most elegant one is the XIR Easy Kit, available from www.XIR.us. At $35.65 (£18.68 at today’s rate) it also makes it a bit of a bargain, so there really is no reason to fiddle with anything else…”
You can read the full article HERE