It wouldn't be HN if I didn't learn something new! I knew it only as XBMC. Even bought that damn IR plug and a remote for xbox. I played only a handful of games on it, but XBMC was in constant use.
> It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.
Almost. I had a set of ffmpeg scripts that would encode blu-rays at 720p just so so it would playback without any dropped frames. But yeah, everything else was fantastic.
I was a heavy IRC user, and that does sound familiar, so that's very likely, but I don't really remember. It might as well have been from sourceforge or the (then) newly released Bittorrent.
It wouldn't be HN if I didn't correct you in that it was originally XBMP on the old Xbox, before it graduated to a media center.
It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.
I remember soldering in an extra IR eye so that I could power on and off the Xbox with the official Media Remote using a special key combination.