Xbox 360 on DD-WRT Routers
So, this has been an expensive few months. This month I wound up with an xbox 360 arcade edition which I wanted to use as a media extender. Since I got it for about $100 new through some special, I figured it'd be a better investment than anything else. I already run playon media server in my house, so this was the best route to go. I may even try a game or two on it :). However, during my research I discovered that the xbox not only does not come with wifi built in (eh?), but you need to use microsofts wifi adapter which sells for about $80 (talk about a huge markup!).
Of course, anyone looking this up on the internet can find a few alternate options. The one I went with was using DD-WRT on a cheap router. I picked up a new draft-n router Airlink AR670W on meritline for about $30, and decided to make my current buffalo WHR-G54s router into an xbox router. Since the buffalo was already running dd-wrt, all I needed to do was put a different dd-wrt bin on it when it came (i didn't need to, but I was using a special vpn bin that was probably overkill for this). I found a pretty good website that explained how to configure the xbox router after you put dd-wrt on it. There were a couple typos in that (line 15 and line 17 should be 192.168.2.1) and since I use MAC security, I had to use the routers WAN MAC address (the one printed on the outside of the router is the LAN MAC address), but other than that, everything went great.
Configuring the AR670w however was kind of a bitch. Apparently the bin they mention on the dd-wrt forums and all over the internet doesn't work properly (lan ports don't work on some versions), so you are supposed to use a different bin (mentioned a few times in this thread, I've linked to one of the pages with a d/l of the correct bin). Hopefully they'll get that fixed by the time anyone else stumbles across this. :) Obviously I could have just used the AR670w as a xbox router, but the 802.11n (albiet draft) was going to be put to better use as a main router and my G router as the xbox connector.
On the media-pc project from a couple months ago, I'm waiting for a new version of Boxee that will come out in december... Right now I'm still using my PS3 with Playon for hulu, since hulu dies half-way through shows on the Mac Mini I used for the living room Media PC. I picked up a mac since I knew it did netflix, didn't know about the hulu issue - the pc version appears to do hulu fine, but no netflix... apparently theres some kind of comedian working over at boxee :)




