With a lot of big, new consoles coming out recently, people are upgrading to the latest and greatest, leaving the original Microsoft XBOX available quite cheaply. You can easily pick one up for around $100.00 AU if not cheaper.

It has a 733mhz Pentium 3 processor and 64mb of ram, and also has an 8gb hard drive built in (along with a DVD drive). It also has a built in 10/100 ethernet port. Not exactly the fastest machine out there, but it's in a neat little package, and will be fast enough for most peoples uses. The DVD playback kit with remote is a must. The video output is outstanding, and can be upscaled to HD if you purchase a seperate dongle.

You need to "mod" your xbox to be able to install the software needed, this can be done by a softmod, a physical mod chip, or a softmod done via hotswapping the harddrive. I chose the latter option as it requires no extra accessories. You might like to upgrade the hard drive if you wish to at this stage, 8gb can be kind of small if you're storing media on it!

What I really want to talk about is XBMC (xbox media center). It's an outstanding piece of software. Not just, it's a good video player, it's one of the nicest, cleanest and well thought out applications I've used. A few of the important features are:

• Stream media directly from a shared network drive, DVD drive or direct from the internet.
  
• Play pretty much every format you can think of, I have not found anything that it cannot play yet.
• Music player with built in visualisations via the milkdrop plugin (as found in winamp).
  
• Photo viewer for slideshows, etc.
• Large database of plugins including a youtube browser, torrent manager, TV Guide, weather.
• Skinnable interface via XML, HTTP/FTP server built in.

It's well worth the time and effort once you have it up and running, for a fully functional dedicated home media center sitting in your lounge room, it's hard to go past for the price and effort!