Regarding the fan wiring: The original "fat" 360 does not have a tach input on the fan header, they added that to the slim model. I realize there are three pins, but they're just 5V, GND, 5V. That one header feeds both of the 360s original fans from separate rails, I think so that they can be PWMed separately. Regarding the DVDROM: I absolutely would have popped the spare drive into this if it would have worked. All 360 DVDROMs are keyed to the board they were sold with originally and will not work in another console; you have to JTAG/RGH to get around that, but I have... other plans. ;)
Could you add a link out to part 1 in your description? I posted a link in the comments, but I'm sure RUclips probably sniped it before it even had a chance lol
xbox researcher/rev-eng girl here, the board on the X360 is physically set up to drive two fans, but the retail SMC controller firmware has always driven them together. this is from a pre-beta phase where the board actually had each fan directly on top of the heatsinks (which themselves were like, those old square coolers from 2004 PCs, because they didn't use a case in the lab yet). basically the fans ran at different speeds based on the separate CPU/GPU temps. you can see the old heatsink config if u look up, uhh, "Nickbaker-riscwatch.png" and look at the loose board on the desk. also the person talking about RROD being from chiplet underfill is 100% correct! chiplet underfill appears to be a binary pass/fail for if you'll get the traditional RROD symptoms.
I don't know why, but "CRD reviews things that are very (very) secretly thin clients" is my favorite non-series on this channel. The NComputing episode and this are both excellent.
It is the one thing that finally solves his one problem with pc’s: the whatever unique thing a manufacturer can add to a fixed machine that has to work like every other fixed machine.
@@nickwallette6201 every time I see a bizarre Microsoft decision that seems the opposite of what it should be, I call it a Certified Microsoft Moment™ because tradesnark is a favorite of mine.
The design of this thing really reminds me of Konami's Python 2 arcade board. If you're not willing to look it up, it's quite literally just a retail PS2, _with the case still on_, with some custom I/O boards connected via USB and an HDD with custom firmware loaded on it similar to FreeHDBoot, all stuffed inside a metal cage with breakout connectors to hide what it really is. It even has a timer that blocks the video signal for a few seconds when it powers on so you don't see the PS2 logo! And it wasn't some aftermarket hackjob, Sony had to have approved it since its firmware is properly signed and it was far from the first time Konami had made arcade hardware that was just a modded PlayStation.
@@spaghetto181 573 is a custom board built around PS1 chips, Python 1 is a custom board built around PS2 chips. At some point it just became cheaper/faster to slap in a retail PS2 with some custom brackets and firmware. Namco shipped a custom board built around *PlayStation 3* chips in the Namco System 357
@@CathodeRayDude So, the Python 2 board was used primarily in DDR SuperNova and SuperNova 2. Python 1 was a PS1 and ran everything from DDR 1st to Extreme. DDR X onwards moved to BEMANI PC (except for the US version which literally just has a Dell in it, and those are considered some of the worst officially licensed Konami DDR cabs in existence). Everything else arcade nowadays is PC based with a bunch of licensing dongles, and DDR switched to revenue share licensing and always-online DRM with DDR 2013, so if you are considering buying a DDR cab, don't buy anything after X3 vs. 2nd Mix unless you want to have to deal with the arcade piracy scene. (You don't.) A lot of other arcade games of this era used modified home console hardware too, but probably not as much of an obvious hackjob as Konami did with all the classic-era DDR. The latest I can think of is Capcom using a modified Wii in Tatsunoko v. Capcom cabs. Yes, that actually got an arcade release. A LOT of games get arcade releases that never actually hit the states - hell, my local Round1 just got Street Fighter 6.
@@snowthearcticfox1 Also, shitshow resolved yesterday. Sony backed out of their decision to require PSN accounts for PC players to play Helldivers 2. And the shirt was probably misdirection to throw us off for the twist of "This thing is an XBox with a case mod and passive cooling."
@@Flutterwhat I don't think CRD is even that aware of modern gaming shit, more or less purposefully. Last I checked they don't play any games from the last decade or two.
The fact that (spoilers) the WMC client boxes are just running remote desktop reminds me a lot of how Apple CarPlay (and presumably Android Auto?) work - they too just treat the car display as a dumb terminal, and do all the processing on the phone. It’s got all the same advantages, where they don’t have to worry about convincing automakers to push an update to their infotainment garbage whenever they want to add a new feature.
Fun fact: the Xbox 360 also could act as a WMC Client box. I used it all the time to watch episodes of Top Gear that were hard to find in America back in the day
I'm an Android Auto guy and was recently at my girlfriend's parent's place in Newfoundland for a bit. They have a GMC Acadia that supports Android Auto. When I was last there two years ago, it worked great. Just plugged in my Pixel 6 and away she went. This time, with the same phone, I got a giant red warning screen when I plugged it in saying something about it being blocked due to a security issue that was present and it wouldn't connect to the car. It said I should update Google Play Services to resolve it, but I did (well, it was already current, I just cleared app data) and nothing improved. The car was on its most current update too. It was really weird cause yeah, I was like "But the car itself basically doesn't do anything."
@@cannotcompute Yeah, the error suggested that. I got them matched down to the minute, but it didn't help. By the next time I'm there, they might have a different car and I'll likely have a different phone so it might all be moot by then. 🙂
1:06:10 Can confirm; my computer nerd mom was perfectly happy to plonk a 360 next to the living room TV and connect it to the home server in the basement, fan noise be damned. Worked quite well tbh. 1:08:15 Can confirm; went apeshit
That was me too. I built my own Vista Media Center machine and had two 360's for extenders. One for my kids and the other for me to game in the bedroom. My wife would not be a happy camper when I was in some long-ass gaming session.
As an electrical engineer i have integrated, put in a bill of materials, and written manufacturing instructions to grab off the shelf consumer products, shuck the case and plop in a product. Monitors, wall warts, USB to audio converters, a little guy, USB hubs, LED drivers, exc never an xbox
Funny thing is some ryobi tools are just molded around a wall wart. I am sure there are a lot of other products done the same way. I have a fan which is hybrid and when you open it up it has a wall wart in it. Quite funny to be honest.
Theres nothing wrong with shucking if its the safest and economical solution. This is a nebulous area of pro consumer products. They probably dont want it to catch fire.
That 'Edge' boot reveal had my jaw on the FLOOR With how prevalent the 360's were to overheating and red-ringing, a passively cooled custom case 360 is astounding. Had it been marketed as such I know many turbo nerds with more money than sense who wouldve bought one of these back in the day. Also about the part about h264/mpeg4, fairly certain that old dashboard/firmware doesnt support it. That didnt come out until support for playing media off USB drives was made which was well after the launch 'Blades' dashboard.
Its probably worth noting that just acting purely as a media centre, it probably wasn't loaded very heavily, which would have reduced the cooling requirements.
@@TomboFry would not be possible to upgrade the firmware because of the fact that the dvd drive is missing. You would either JTAG the console or rgh 1.2. Red ringing isnt as much of an issue with the falcon/jasper revision due to the die shink.
I'm an electrician and today at work a coworker ripped out a bunch of panels and set them aside for me to scrap which I'm currently doing. You always seem to upload when I need you the most.😊
51:57 My wife's road bike must feel the same way when loaded onto an indoor trainer that has a floating support for the fork. "I can't feel my wheels... what happened to my wheels? Somebody please look at my wheels" "Sssssh, you have very beautiful wheels, Finn. You're upright, aren't you? Now try not to worry"
That dangerous ground issue is a prime example why Class I products like this are required to be 100% tested for ground continuity and in some cases pass a 25 A ground bond test at the end of assembly. And yeah a case screw isn't a sufficient bonding technique, almost always has to be on a separate internal post with shake proof washer in order to pass the 25 A ground bond test with a low enough resistance. Seen some scary stuff come out of small companies, worst is when they acknowledge it and say the risk is negligible for the cost to change it, particularly when you mention the word 'recall'. With that said the downside is the cost of the equipment and staff to preform those those tests and get their design certified by an NRTL is often unobtainable for many small business which just cements the standing of large billion dollar corporations that made their initial money before those safety regulations existed, hence why government grants are essential for small business.
Some chinesium hifi company had a few cases of their amps literally blowing the coils out of headphones due to grounding issues rendering their DC-protection on the headphone output inoperable (not that it is a great design to begin with). EU consumer protection only let is slide since it had an external powerbrick.
Yep. Barriers are too high to test, and too high to fix, and too high to service a recall, so it comes down to just hoping nothing goes wrong. It's not actually a problem that the chassis isn't grounded under normal circumstances. The original design was never meant to be. The device ground was always galvanically isolated from earth ground. But, since there are mains lines running through the chassis, if those were ever damaged and shorted to the chassis, you're counting on luck that they don't touch anything conductive. A ground lug right off the IEC inlet would've fixed that easily. I can't fathom how anyone who knows enough to build a device like this wouldn't understand that.
It looks to me like a screw right besides the Earth logo on the inside of the chassis in vicinity of the power connector was possibly intended to serve as a grounding point if fitted with the correct bite washer and a correct screw. Not sure whether that's a dedicated ground screw point or whether that's a foot screw. As to subsidies for small businesses... this depends how you see the economy. Fundamentally, VC can bring viable businesses through that initial stage where the costs are way too high to where a new company may become a big manufacturer themselves and compete on equal footing, so free-market economists would argue against subsidy. But then there are secondary potentially strategic advantages to helping businesses survive that have low inherent viability if these businesses also nurture say the engineering or manufacturing field or some other vital field.
God, the talk about overpriced media equipment at the start sent me into flashbacks of taking tech support calls for DirecTV. So many calls from rich assholes setting up their boxes at their summer homes (or on their boats) and getting mad at me that our receivers didn't have certain connections for their very very special audio equipment that they NEEDED to explain how expensive and special it was. Meanwhile I'm getting paid a measly $10/hr to take back-to-back calls all day while my supervisor heavily implies that if I ever need to take a shit at work, I should hold it in until my (unpaid) lunch break.
Sorry you had to deal with that but my experience with Direct TV and their tech support were all awful. They basically stole thousands of dollars from my grandma.
I WAS RIGHT. Between the form factor, weird number of USB ports, fan position, and that odd Ethernet port, I was pretty sure, but the remote sold it. Laughed like a madman when you rebooted it.
I have a good deal of respect for these guys. They clearly bit off a bit more than they could chew with that product portfolio, but there were legitimately clever people trying to make something work.
@@SmaMan Theranos was pretty much an outright scam. They promised the moon, lied about capabilities, and failed to deliver. Niveus at least made actual products that did what they were supposed to do. They just couldn't compete on pricing or volume with any major OEM.
I think realistically the only way* to test the thermals while gaming would be to swap another entire console into this chassis cause you can't just plop another drive into this without it being a nightmare. 360 dvd drives and motherboards are tied together because microsoft saw what everyone was doing with the original xbox and decided to pull a 180 on that shit. (or a 360 i guess) that being said i feel like taking the original hardware out of this bodged together disaster would ALSO be a nightmare so. edit* aside from updating the firmware, anyway.
@@Hafk It looks like this is running manufacture date firmware, likely one of the easiest 360s to hack (because how many JTAG-able consoles would still exist?). Wouldn't it be easier to do that?
@@RichardDzien Is that even possible since some used different drive manufactures, like plop in a samsung when it originally had a hitachi? Im not sure how much it cares other than having a matching key.
@@RichardDzien You would have to desolder the wire from the cable. But anyone in the 90's who had both computer experience and a beard would have known the right too to add a wire to a pin - wire wrap!
Idk whats the biggest shock here for me tbh. The wonky hardware, or the fact that only now, two decades after I first got a PC, do I learn that Media Center was meant for TVs, and not a very weirdly designed alternative to Windows Media Player that sometimes I would accidentally open and couldn’t seem to be able to quit. 11yo me was very perplexed by this piece of software lmao.
FFS. I tried at the time Windows Media Center, saw it was an RDP(by picture quality) and dropped the idea thinking media playback will be streamed via RDP too. What a weird architecture. Great review!
how the hell did I only just realize the background wall's color is the Win 95 default desktop color also obligatory *orson welles clapping furiously* anytime I see the original 360 blade interface, god it was so damn good.
So yeah, I was one of those people who bought an XB360 primarily to use it as a WMC Extender. I did eventually use the 360 for games too, but first and foremost I bought it to use WMC running on my desktop computer while sitting in front of my tv (without having to have a PC sitting in the home theater).
>be media center >comically large profile that looks bigger than regular desktops The original buyer would be pretty upset once they know a game console could do 80% of what this media center were designed to do, minus the funny Audiophile jacks Whoops
There is a slight, very niche, benefit to blades firmware: for games that could run on it, there is a possibility that framerates and load times are slightly better. The Tony Hawk speedrunning community found that it was optimal to run Tony Hawk's Project 8 on blades firmware. very dumb! ultimately it doesn't matter though, it's possible to hack a 360 to restore the old firmware and get the same benefits
1:09:02 It's actually worse than snapping the solder balls off the motherboard; it'll actually snap the balls off the die that connect the die to the chip package. Or at least it'll do that most of the time and that's why reballing was such a crapshoot.
1:02:37 Padding their product line-up may have been precisely the reason for this kind of rebrand. As you note, the number of products they offer gives the illusion of a much larger company with broad expertise, which can foster customer trust. Spending a little bit of manpower for a quick rebrand out of pocket doesn't seem that wild considering the number of products which are sold at a (sometimes significant) loss, relying on cross subsidization.
Yeah I was guessing that while the thermal solution might have been fine for media playback, it wouldn't necessarily be able to cope with say Halo 3. Remember that there is a difference between thermal transfer capacity, and max allowable delta. A huge passive heatsink could easily be able to shift that much heat, but that doesn't mean it could do it fast enough under crunch to keep the chips from spiking outside of their operating range. The fact that it was neither grounded nor double wall insulated was horrifying.
Falcon still had overheating issues. I had one and it didn't ever red ring(of death) but would overheat. You turn it on, fans would ramp up to 100% and the system would show the overheating red ring for overheating. I tried repeating it but it didn't help...
Personally it looks better cooled than the Xboxes I have opened up before and It still has a fan... Although it's been a while since I'm have opened up a 360.
That heatsink looks better than its real thermal capability. Most of the area has high thermal impedance to heatpipes and isn't doing any work, and convection is fundamentally quite weak until you reach rather toasty temperatures. I'm quite certain the two fans blowing directly on heatpipes, even if it's a little unconventional, dissipate substantially more heat than the imposing looking external heatsink.
Had some custom fan less IPCs for a clean room delivered some years ago. The behaved weird, sometimes didn't turn on, died randomly and no one had a clue. Had them go back for repair a few times without success. One day I disconnected a Displayport cord while it was on, saw an arc and it was dead. After that I got a DC clamp meter out, and put it on the Displayport cable. There where over 6 Amps DC from the power brick cable thru the mainboard, over the Displayport cable shield, Monitor, it's power cable earth, the earth cable in the wall and than back to the power brick. It was wild! They all had a bad chassis ground connection from the power brick. Had them redo the barrel jack on the back plate and since then they worked without any issues.
By 2008, the Falcon revision 360 (which is almost definitely what this is) would've cured the Red Ring completely since the new GPU it had didn't have issues anymore. That was not just bad, flexy PCB's but also ATI chips that were badly manufactured because this was the early days of RoHS and nobody knew how to do it right (similar story to what got Nvidia with Bumpgate, which led to the PS3's Yellow Light of Death).
Did you test it with the Microsoft HD DVD player add-on? Its just mind-bendingly hilarious how this version fixes some of the early / launch XBOX 360 design flaws
This is only tangentially related but I’ve never seen anyone else ever talk about this: when the update came to the 360 that allowed it to rip games to the hard drive, it came with the claim that it wouldn’t speed up loading by that much because games weren’t designed for it. Well, there was one extremely odd exception: Armored Core for answer (yes that’s its name) had a menu for loading mech configurations, but opening said menu took an irritatingly long time, with two loading screens, a short fake out loading screen and second much longer screen. For some reason, installing the game on the 360 completely cut out the second longer screen, I have no idea why other than it possibly being a vestigial PS3 function that somehow started working again, and I have never seen anyone else mention it online.
All that attention to mechanical design, and then they run analog AV wiring across the RF-rich environment of an active motherboard using unshielded, not even twisted wires to the back panel RCA jacks *shakes head*. I'm a mechanical engineer and know that's a bargin-bin electronics move.
I not only needed this level of information for this topic, but for ALL topics! Long form videos like this enrich my life so much and I really appreciate the amount of work you put in to them. I'd be down for even longer videos tbh.. so don't worry about runtime ;3
You hit the nail right on the head. This was likely a rushed product to meant to fill in that gap before proper stuff came out that they could sell/rebrand. April/May is when Contractors renovate rich people's homes in the Hamptons. They want products to install - Preferably a whole system of products from a single vendor. If this thing was the only Vista Media Center compatible complete lineup, that could have been a big deal. Making custom chassis would have probably been more expensive, and taken too much time, so they just reused something they already had - This much I can speculate as someone who has worked in that area for multiple summers. You see a lot of custom made stuff from small companies you never heard of, like a custom stand up fans with legs that look like an antique brass telescope. - But if you have a good enough eye you can tell it was a standard Lasko fan put into a new housing.
Man i kinda figured what the core concept was when you mentioned the Edge being an Xbox back in your thrift haul video, but i had no idea it had a legitimate purpose. Side note, this would be a dream to mod and load games off an external drive, assuming the wifi for the controllers is still enabled. It'd almost be like an oversized Wii.
There were plenty if add-on rear fan accessories that sucked additional air out of the back of the 360 using a pass through power connector. Still have one on my launch 360. All they wouldve needed was spade connectors or a massive solder blob at that point? They were all pretty crappy plastic so shucking them wouldn't have been hard and I recall them costing
High end customers are a client base that's very stressful to have. I totally understand why they worked under such panic, they made promises to some big shots that they were terrified to disappoint.
honestly its kind of a shame they took out the disc drive, if i was a wealthy, image focused, mid-00's guy id be so down for a classy-looking Xbox with fancy custom cooling to make it run quieter... but i guess if i was that guy id probabky scoff at Gears of War so its probabky a good thing im not
Yeah, the HD era of games (7th gen) was the time game companies were bending over backwards to make gaming look more "mature" with its gritty reboots and a color palette of brown, brown, brown, and gray.
As someone building multiple silent yet heavily overclocked PC cases out of cheapest particle board in very early 2000s I can appreciate this. Good times... grinding the links on an AMD Duron CPU I just got from my small student stipend was both scary and satisfying.
I remember Windows Media Center being very popular. When it was removed from later Microsoft operating systems there were still people trying to get it installed in these OS. I was never a fan of Windows Media Center. More of a KODI fan. Originally known as Xbox Media Player (XBMP) then Xbox Media Center (XBMC) for its ability to be installed on the original modded Xbox gaming consoles. With a more user friendly interface, ease of use, worked on low power systems, high media compatibility and most of all free to use.
love your brief on audiophile stuff at the beginning. the most hilarious product I ever saw was an optical SPDIF cable with gold plated connectors. I shit you not. Everyone of course knows that there's zero electrical conduction through an optical SPDIF cable, and indeed that is the entire point. "Separating a fool from their money, a morally neutral act" indeed!
this is just a nitpick, but the 360 doesn't show any errors if the DVD drive is missing. it flashes the power LED rapidly instead (the one niveus used for their custom power LED). second nitpick, still watching the video. the 360 GPUs desoldering wasn't the issue. you can resolder a dead GPU a thousand times, and it'll fix nothing. the underfill on the GPU itself is the problem.
I remember this period and recall trying to convince my parents to get a 360 for “just the media center” lol. Also what a great in depth video. This is the first video I’ve seen of yours but I’m in. Cheers
Went aboard a superyacht back in 2003 when the America's Cup was in Auckland, NZ. It was fitted with some kind of media center server somewhere and a black Xbox 360 connected to every TV, that acted as media center extenders and had a library of preloaded games. There was some kind of very fast internet connection (could have been an ethernet cable out the window, they were tied to a dock), but everything still worked offline, so you could be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and still play some multiplayer games using "system link" or stream from a large library of movies and TV series stored on a server somewhere. That server, somewhere in the racks of no-expense-spared navigation, communications, line of business, audio and video gear may well have been one of these Niveus units. Even the grey, white and gold aesthetic wouldn't have looked out of place.
btw, the wireless controller that actually does the connection to the xbox controllers is also on that front panel. literally right next to the ring of LEDs. you can even solder USB wires to it and use it like a normal 360 dongle :)
Re: the powerfall (or whatever) units like that were extremely popular in some university and hospital locations that had MRI scanners. MRI scans were *huge* for the time (late 90s - early 2000s) so the capability to have many of them online and available within a couple of minutes was a real game changer.
Before Vista and the Xbox 360, Microsoft did sell a kit to use the original Xbox as a Media Center Extender for XP. It included a software DVD, a remote, and the same IR/decoder dongle that came with the DVD movie playback kit (though the remote was different). The performance of the media browser on the original Xbox was just as sluggish as the Linksys extender you have. As far as I know, only the Xbox 360 ran smoothly as an XP extender. My guess is the MCE client in the 360 is some sort of proprietary build unique to the 360 (kind of like how it was the only extender to support both versions for so long). Microsoft never did update the original Xbox extender kit to work with Vista.
In 2004, I built a "Media Centre PC" based on an Athlon64 and a Radeon X800 running MythTV on Gentoo (64bit). It included quite a few custom modifications. It output interlaced Component Video with field synchronisation to the video renderer allowing interlaced video to be played directly. It also included a digital TV tuners and a CAM i which I modified to clone the Nagra decoder ID for my pay TV servive, so I could just use the card. I also wrote a PHP web interface to remotely access the content, which I even streamed dynamically re-encoded to my Nokia phone, albeit with very low resolution and bitrate!
36:18 I literally just learned today by clicking a random website that there are flexible heat pipes made for high vibration environments or challenging installation. Though not a very good sign it's for consumers when custom, aerospace, and military shows up in the datasheet.
In US electrical stuff, you can use a screw to bond the outlet box to a metal wire box (the part in the wall). The NEC says this is enough grounding. The reciptical does need to be grounded through wire first though. This is only the ground for the box.
Don't forget that people were also buying PS3's *as* a Blu-ray player. for a shockingly long time after Blu-rays hit the shelves, it was more cost effective to buy a PS3 as a blu-ray player. same thing with the PS2. I recon microsoft saw sony enjoying their limelight and was like "huh what if we did that too with something we already own" and made it so. and MS was definitely kicking themselves from the OG xbox not having a DVD player until you bought the remote (which was basically just a DOLBY licensing DRM dongle and cost cutting measure on their end)
Considering every single Xbox was sold at a loss... probably for the better. Almost any other company? Eh... history is littered with companies that sold the consoles at a significant loss and never recouped it with fees. Microsoft? They've bankrolled the Xbox project through 20 years, they were the only ones where they could afford to use the first console as a loss leader for the eventual profit on the 360. (until they all RRoD'd, that is)
It was possible to break out of the WMC interface on the receiver and access the desktop, used to do it on the Xbox 360. A few people made emulators that could be ran via this method.
I remember trying the extender on both the OG Xbox and 360 back in the day but ended up just sticking to XBMC/Kodi on the OG Xbox because of various issues IIRC e.g. high bandwidth (an issue over the wifi connection), codecs, etc. IIRC Orb on the Wii was a more reliable method than trying to use this thanks to it's built in transcoder, obviously this was pre-plex. That said, IIRC I had to install extra codecs on WMC anyway to make it practical for video playback. The only time I'd say I had success with WMC was on the host PC, typically my laptop when I was away from home and viewing from a distance/TV with a remote.
Even though I got spoiled by early appearence of the Edge in the thrift video, I still got surprised by the video because I never knew that you can use 360 as a WMC repeater.
man, i love the aesthetics of those things, they looks so good with the brushed black/blue alluminum. if i had the money i'd just get those two just for that
the blades UI absolutely has advantages over subsequent updates. i dont love it for nostalgia, I love it because from a UI/UX nerd POV it is incredibly well designed and makes it incredibly easy to find and do the things you want to do. wheras subsequent UIs are visually cluttered, hard to intuitively navigate, and hide features behind several superfluous button presses and screens
I have already written this as a reply to an existing comment, but I have to say it here too. CRD and Technology Connections are the only channels from which I'm able to watch an hour long video, especially considering ADHD. They both script their videos in an absolutely informative, hilarious and focus-oriented way so that despite appearing boring in the thumbnail, the content of the video is and has been entertaining through and through. 😊
Every one of your videos makes me want to run to someone and say “OMG! Can you freakin’ believe this?!” But then I realize the only people who would find this interesting are probably already watching this video. I’ve literally had a conversation in my head along the lines of “Man, who should I tell about this? Who’s that guy…? Oh, right, that’s me.” Please keep this up. I love this dive into the failed potential and the self-sabotage at Microsoft around Windows Media Center and the whole Green Button community. Heck, I had a Windows Media Server. I was a believer.
Fascinating kit. My biggest problem with it isn't the shoddy engineering, it's the fact that you'd be buying physical hardware that was entirely dependent on features in a specific version of Windows. By definition, it's going to be out of date - or perhaps even non-functional - in a few years. I think enthusiasts investing in a home theatre setup would have known this and put their money into something with a slightly longer shelf life. In my case, that was a simple Samba server and decent network.
49:19 Besides confusing messaging in the system UI, in this case the main problem caused by deleting the DVD drive is that the 360 flashes the power LED while the tray is moving (or, while the tray is not in the state that the 360 is asking it to be). This would cause the power LED on the front of the device to flash permanently, hence the need to trick it into thinking it has a closed drive.
I am pretty sure they removed the DVD drive to keep up the illusion of having developed their own device some more. If you had to go to the blade dashboard to play a DVD and manually switch back to the media center later, the 'illusion' would have been ruined.
How are some of these comments days older than the video? OMGWTFBBQ!? Did I find a wormhole? Another great video by CRD. You have to admire Niveus's ambition. The switch the Vista and the lack of Media Extenders may have left Niveus with a stack of pre-existing orders they could not fulfill until they came up with an extender. And they needed to ship that stack of orders for cash flow- to get money sunk in yet unmovable inventory to pay their bills. They may have "engineered" this whole thing over one "work through the nights" weekend. Necessity may breed innovation, but desperation breeds sloppy work. In an alternate timeline I could see Niveus selling premium fanless cases for quiet gaming rigs- getting enough of a market to actually have some economies of scale and use more normal production facilities to get the cost way way down for it to make more sense. There are industrial applications where fanless designs are preferred so there are not any moving parts to fail, and industrial applications can absorb cottage industry prices. Niveus could have made it if they gave up on the whole media center thing. But that was their dream.. so I guess that doesn't matter now.
That dvd rom drive just lived in your head rent free until this was published huh Gravis?😂😂 great video! Stream o thon planned anytime ? You deserve it. Hope you’re well! Keep pushing,your channel is one of my favorites. Thank you
Working in the RV industry I've seen swanky things like this were the company just couldnt put an xbox 360 beside a TV oh no so they create a custom cabinet to house it with extensions but often enough the custom parts fail before the device is either obsolete or broken costing the customer even more money. But I guess when your paying a few million dollars for an RV that's thr gist. But I have never seen a set up quite like this. This thing is like next level to that
Watching this with a raspberry pi 4 cooled with a 12V SILENX fan running at 5V over USB. The Edge internal fan probably has VHB tape under it rated at a gazillion lbs. As you said, the Edge looks like a fantabulous unfinished POC. I would have been proud to present that at a meeting, but dismayed that it went into production as is.
Niveus missed a selling point if they had kept the DVD drive - it was a Windows Media Centre extender that could also play Xbox games. I'm sure there was someone who lived in a mansion that wanted WMC and figured "hey why not, I'll play some Halo or something" down the road. I mean, people in mansions have kids sometimes so...? EDIT after actually watching the conclusion: whoops never mind lmao
1:10:21 I just want to say that those stories are what drew me to stay here, well among other things maybe but all this info I had probably most of the times never heard about is damn interesting :)
I would love for you to publish an interview with the CEO of Niveus and other people working at the company. It might make a good full-length documentary.
Man. Sorry to shatter your dreams. But I doubt CRD would JTAG or RGH this... Just too rare tbh. And that's the only way to play optical games. (DVD drives are locked on the Xb360)
The video was really entertaining. It's crazy what adventures some companies go on. If I had bought the device and unscrewed it as usual, I would probably have laughed myself to death.
You need a mechanical, non-soldered connection between the mains ground pin and the chassis if you want UL or just about any legit certification for your metal chassis product.
That's interesting - non-soldered is a requirement? Is that why ground wires always seem to be crimp ring lugs? I remember a long, long time ago I was talking to someone who was making cable harnesses for military vehicles and they said that crimp-on butt splices were considered on-par or better than solder, wondering if this is related.
@@CathodeRayDude I'm an EE and I used to work at UL many years ago and part of my time there i worked on information technology equipment (UL1950/IEC60950). I can safely (ha-ha) say that this contraption didn't have a chance in hell of meeting the requirements, simply for the hack job they did with the x-box power supply. One of the main purposes of safety certification is to test and verify (both during the initial testing and subsequent factory inspections) isolation and grounding. Once they broke open the power supply, all safety related work done on it went out the window, since now a single fault such as a wire or a component in the power supply touching the chassis, would electrify it. And since there's no ground path through the power cord, electricity would find the next best path and go through the human touching it. The whole point of grounding the metal chassis is, if it is electrified, high current rushes from live to ground and pops the circuit breaker, keeping the user from harm. Another interesting point is that as far as i know, selling information technology equipment without safety certification is by code not allowed, which obviously didn't bother these guys. Anyway, I would have never known about this equipment if it wasn't for your video. So thanks.
![Little Guys 5: Three Of Them [MediaSite / NCR N3000]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/fA993o51Vms/mqdefault.jpg)
![Little Guys 5: Three Of Them [MediaSite / NCR N3000]](/img/tr.png)
![State of Play | September 24, 2024 [ENGLISH]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/fVs0suPHAX8/mqdefault.jpg)
Regarding the fan wiring: The original "fat" 360 does not have a tach input on the fan header, they added that to the slim model. I realize there are three pins, but they're just 5V, GND, 5V. That one header feeds both of the 360s original fans from separate rails, I think so that they can be PWMed separately.
Regarding the DVDROM: I absolutely would have popped the spare drive into this if it would have worked. All 360 DVDROMs are keyed to the board they were sold with originally and will not work in another console; you have to JTAG/RGH to get around that, but I have... other plans. ;)
your plans worry and interest me
Would be cool to JTAG it even it it's just to get the keys and see if a flashed drive can fire up some early games
Could you add a link out to part 1 in your description? I posted a link in the comments, but I'm sure RUclips probably sniped it before it even had a chance lol
You could also replace the xbox board in there with a different one and see how it runs playing games.
xbox researcher/rev-eng girl here, the board on the X360 is physically set up to drive two fans, but the retail SMC controller firmware has always driven them together. this is from a pre-beta phase where the board actually had each fan directly on top of the heatsinks (which themselves were like, those old square coolers from 2004 PCs, because they didn't use a case in the lab yet). basically the fans ran at different speeds based on the separate CPU/GPU temps. you can see the old heatsink config if u look up, uhh, "Nickbaker-riscwatch.png" and look at the loose board on the desk.
also the person talking about RROD being from chiplet underfill is 100% correct! chiplet underfill appears to be a binary pass/fail for if you'll get the traditional RROD symptoms.
I don't know why, but "CRD reviews things that are very (very) secretly thin clients" is my favorite non-series on this channel. The NComputing episode and this are both excellent.
(not so) little guys
@@k1ndaconfused "Chonkers"
It is the one thing that finally solves his one problem with pc’s: the whatever unique thing a manufacturer can add to a fixed machine that has to work like every other fixed machine.
😂 yes!
The reveal is always my favorite part. Gravis does such an amazing job writing and performing these stories!
The red ring of death on the power button in the thumbnail is an extraordinary touch.
Windows Vista's Media Center breaking XP Media Center Extenders is a Certified Microsoft Moment™.
😭🤣😂😂😭😂😂😭😂😭😂😭
It is truly one of the most Microsoft things of all time. I would expect nothing more of them.
@@nickwallette6201 every time I see a bizarre Microsoft decision that seems the opposite of what it should be, I call it a Certified Microsoft Moment™ because tradesnark is a favorite of mine.
And they never stopped
The only Extender that continued to work up through Win 8.1 was the Xbox 360. No surprise there, MS really wanted you to buy Xbox 360s from day one.
The design of this thing really reminds me of Konami's Python 2 arcade board. If you're not willing to look it up, it's quite literally just a retail PS2, _with the case still on_, with some custom I/O boards connected via USB and an HDD with custom firmware loaded on it similar to FreeHDBoot, all stuffed inside a metal cage with breakout connectors to hide what it really is. It even has a timer that blocks the video signal for a few seconds when it powers on so you don't see the PS2 logo! And it wasn't some aftermarket hackjob, Sony had to have approved it since its firmware is properly signed and it was far from the first time Konami had made arcade hardware that was just a modded PlayStation.
Oh my god they actually bothered to hide the logo, that's amazing commitment to the bit. I gotta see one of these.
i believe earlier system 573 is also playstation based(ps1) yes.
@@spaghetto181 573 is a custom board built around PS1 chips, Python 1 is a custom board built around PS2 chips. At some point it just became cheaper/faster to slap in a retail PS2 with some custom brackets and firmware. Namco shipped a custom board built around *PlayStation 3* chips in the Namco System 357
It looks like a parasite wrapped around the Playstation
@@CathodeRayDude So, the Python 2 board was used primarily in DDR SuperNova and SuperNova 2. Python 1 was a PS1 and ran everything from DDR 1st to Extreme. DDR X onwards moved to BEMANI PC (except for the US version which literally just has a Dell in it, and those are considered some of the worst officially licensed Konami DDR cabs in existence). Everything else arcade nowadays is PC based with a bunch of licensing dongles, and DDR switched to revenue share licensing and always-online DRM with DDR 2013, so if you are considering buying a DDR cab, don't buy anything after X3 vs. 2nd Mix unless you want to have to deal with the arcade piracy scene. (You don't.)
A lot of other arcade games of this era used modified home console hardware too, but probably not as much of an obvious hackjob as Konami did with all the classic-era DDR. The latest I can think of is Capcom using a modified Wii in Tatsunoko v. Capcom cabs. Yes, that actually got an arcade release. A LOT of games get arcade releases that never actually hit the states - hell, my local Round1 just got Street Fighter 6.
The PlayStation shirt is a nice touch.
but helldivers!
@@Flutterwhat this was almost certainly recorded before that shitshow.
@@snowthearcticfox1 Also, shitshow resolved yesterday. Sony backed out of their decision to require PSN accounts for PC players to play Helldivers 2.
And the shirt was probably misdirection to throw us off for the twist of "This thing is an XBox with a case mod and passive cooling."
@@Flutterwhat I don't think CRD is even that aware of modern gaming shit, more or less purposefully. Last I checked they don't play any games from the last decade or two.
Haha, I didn't even realize the "opposite" until I read this comment!
The fact that (spoilers) the WMC client boxes are just running remote desktop reminds me a lot of how Apple CarPlay (and presumably Android Auto?) work - they too just treat the car display as a dumb terminal, and do all the processing on the phone. It’s got all the same advantages, where they don’t have to worry about convincing automakers to push an update to their infotainment garbage whenever they want to add a new feature.
Fun fact: the Xbox 360 also could act as a WMC Client box. I used it all the time to watch episodes of Top Gear that were hard to find in America back in the day
I'm an Android Auto guy and was recently at my girlfriend's parent's place in Newfoundland for a bit. They have a GMC Acadia that supports Android Auto. When I was last there two years ago, it worked great. Just plugged in my Pixel 6 and away she went. This time, with the same phone, I got a giant red warning screen when I plugged it in saying something about it being blocked due to a security issue that was present and it wouldn't connect to the car. It said I should update Google Play Services to resolve it, but I did (well, it was already current, I just cleared app data) and nothing improved. The car was on its most current update too. It was really weird cause yeah, I was like "But the car itself basically doesn't do anything."
@@PXAbstraction Next time you're in the car, make sure the date and time on both the car and the phone match. No idea why that matters, but it does.
@@cannotcompute Certificates. Same reason why printers dont print if the date and time are wrong.
@@cannotcompute Yeah, the error suggested that. I got them matched down to the minute, but it didn't help. By the next time I'm there, they might have a different car and I'll likely have a different phone so it might all be moot by then. 🙂
1:06:10 Can confirm; my computer nerd mom was perfectly happy to plonk a 360 next to the living room TV and connect it to the home server in the basement, fan noise be damned. Worked quite well tbh.
1:08:15 Can confirm; went apeshit
That was me too. I built my own Vista Media Center machine and had two 360's for extenders. One for my kids and the other for me to game in the bedroom. My wife would not be a happy camper when I was in some long-ass gaming session.
As an electrical engineer i have integrated, put in a bill of materials, and written manufacturing instructions to grab off the shelf consumer products, shuck the case and plop in a product.
Monitors, wall warts, USB to audio converters, a little guy, USB hubs, LED drivers, exc
never an xbox
As a tinkerer, a lot of things I've built just have off the shelf devices inside, still in the original case, but never an Xbox.
Well the night is young...
Funny thing is some ryobi tools are just molded around a wall wart. I am sure there are a lot of other products done the same way. I have a fan which is hybrid and when you open it up it has a wall wart in it. Quite funny to be honest.
Theres nothing wrong with shucking if its the safest and economical solution.
This is a nebulous area of pro consumer products.
They probably dont want it to catch fire.
@@kameljoe21 CRD did a video on a Roybi drill battery wall plug hybrid and was shocked to find a in case UL power supply.
That 'Edge' boot reveal had my jaw on the FLOOR
With how prevalent the 360's were to overheating and red-ringing, a passively cooled custom case 360 is astounding. Had it been marketed as such I know many turbo nerds with more money than sense who wouldve bought one of these back in the day.
Also about the part about h264/mpeg4, fairly certain that old dashboard/firmware doesnt support it. That didnt come out until support for playing media off USB drives was made which was well after the launch 'Blades' dashboard.
So you're saying if CRD *did* upgrade the firmware we might see MP4 playback?! I'm sure that will annoy no one, why not give it a try! 😏
Its probably worth noting that just acting purely as a media centre, it probably wasn't loaded very heavily, which would have reduced the cooling requirements.
@@TomboFry would not be possible to upgrade the firmware because of the fact that the dvd drive is missing. You would either JTAG the console or rgh 1.2. Red ringing isnt as much of an issue with the falcon/jasper revision due to the die shink.
Fun fact the blades dashboard does support USB but it was just disabled at a kernel level if I recall
The RROD was only a problem on xenons and very very early falcons
I'm an electrician and today at work a coworker ripped out a bunch of panels and set them aside for me to scrap which I'm currently doing. You always seem to upload when I need you the most.😊
51:57 My wife's road bike must feel the same way when loaded onto an indoor trainer that has a floating support for the fork. "I can't feel my wheels... what happened to my wheels? Somebody please look at my wheels" "Sssssh, you have very beautiful wheels, Finn. You're upright, aren't you? Now try not to worry"
That is horrifying and beautiful.
You talk to your bike very kindly.
That dangerous ground issue is a prime example why Class I products like this are required to be 100% tested for ground continuity and in some cases pass a 25 A ground bond test at the end of assembly. And yeah a case screw isn't a sufficient bonding technique, almost always has to be on a separate internal post with shake proof washer in order to pass the 25 A ground bond test with a low enough resistance. Seen some scary stuff come out of small companies, worst is when they acknowledge it and say the risk is negligible for the cost to change it, particularly when you mention the word 'recall'.
With that said the downside is the cost of the equipment and staff to preform those those tests and get their design certified by an NRTL is often unobtainable for many small business which just cements the standing of large billion dollar corporations that made their initial money before those safety regulations existed, hence why government grants are essential for small business.
Hello! Fancy seeing you here!
Some chinesium hifi company had a few cases of their amps literally blowing the coils out of headphones due to grounding issues rendering their DC-protection on the headphone output inoperable (not that it is a great design to begin with).
EU consumer protection only let is slide since it had an external powerbrick.
Yep. Barriers are too high to test, and too high to fix, and too high to service a recall, so it comes down to just hoping nothing goes wrong.
It's not actually a problem that the chassis isn't grounded under normal circumstances. The original design was never meant to be. The device ground was always galvanically isolated from earth ground. But, since there are mains lines running through the chassis, if those were ever damaged and shorted to the chassis, you're counting on luck that they don't touch anything conductive. A ground lug right off the IEC inlet would've fixed that easily. I can't fathom how anyone who knows enough to build a device like this wouldn't understand that.
It looks to me like a screw right besides the Earth logo on the inside of the chassis in vicinity of the power connector was possibly intended to serve as a grounding point if fitted with the correct bite washer and a correct screw. Not sure whether that's a dedicated ground screw point or whether that's a foot screw.
As to subsidies for small businesses... this depends how you see the economy. Fundamentally, VC can bring viable businesses through that initial stage where the costs are way too high to where a new company may become a big manufacturer themselves and compete on equal footing, so free-market economists would argue against subsidy. But then there are secondary potentially strategic advantages to helping businesses survive that have low inherent viability if these businesses also nurture say the engineering or manufacturing field or some other vital field.
God, the talk about overpriced media equipment at the start sent me into flashbacks of taking tech support calls for DirecTV. So many calls from rich assholes setting up their boxes at their summer homes (or on their boats) and getting mad at me that our receivers didn't have certain connections for their very very special audio equipment that they NEEDED to explain how expensive and special it was. Meanwhile I'm getting paid a measly $10/hr to take back-to-back calls all day while my supervisor heavily implies that if I ever need to take a shit at work, I should hold it in until my (unpaid) lunch break.
Sorry you had to deal with that but my experience with Direct TV and their tech support were all awful. They basically stole thousands of dollars from my grandma.
What do you mean it doesn't have RS-232?? How am I supposed to hook this up to my Crestron remote control that costs more than your car?!?
@@nickwallette6201 "Fortunately, sir, we can supply you with an adapter that will make your setup cost more than TWO of my car." 😜
@@nickwallette6201: If only everything did have RS-232 control, then you could rig up some cheap $5 solution to anything under the sun.
I WAS RIGHT.
Between the form factor, weird number of USB ports, fan position, and that odd Ethernet port, I was pretty sure, but the remote sold it. Laughed like a madman when you rebooted it.
I love how the video is about a Xbox implanted into a random box while the host is wearing a Playstation shirt.
I have a good deal of respect for these guys. They clearly bit off a bit more than they could chew with that product portfolio, but there were legitimately clever people trying to make something work.
Like Theranos, but they actually made something.
@@SmaMan Theranos was pretty much an outright scam. They promised the moon, lied about capabilities, and failed to deliver. Niveus at least made actual products that did what they were supposed to do. They just couldn't compete on pricing or volume with any major OEM.
Totally was waiting for you to whip out a drive with Halo in it and reveal it playing with a casual "so I did" at the end.
I think realistically the only way* to test the thermals while gaming would be to swap another entire console into this chassis cause you can't just plop another drive into this without it being a nightmare. 360 dvd drives and motherboards are tied together because microsoft saw what everyone was doing with the original xbox and decided to pull a 180 on that shit. (or a 360 i guess)
that being said i feel like taking the original hardware out of this bodged together disaster would ALSO be a nightmare so.
edit* aside from updating the firmware, anyway.
@@Hafk It looks like this is running manufacture date firmware, likely one of the easiest 360s to hack (because how many JTAG-able consoles would still exist?). Wouldn't it be easier to do that?
He could totally do that. Just disconnect the janky extra cable and reconnect the proper one connected to the DVD drive.
@@RichardDzien Is that even possible since some used different drive manufactures, like plop in a samsung when it originally had a hitachi? Im not sure how much it cares other than having a matching key.
@@RichardDzien You would have to desolder the wire from the cable.
But anyone in the 90's who had both computer experience and a beard would have known the right too to add a wire to a pin - wire wrap!
Throughout the entire first half "Yeah, but what about the 360"
The entire second half "Oh my god, why did I want to know?"
Idk whats the biggest shock here for me tbh. The wonky hardware, or the fact that only now, two decades after I first got a PC, do I learn that Media Center was meant for TVs, and not a very weirdly designed alternative to Windows Media Player that sometimes I would accidentally open and couldn’t seem to be able to quit. 11yo me was very perplexed by this piece of software lmao.
FFS. I tried at the time Windows Media Center, saw it was an RDP(by picture quality) and dropped the idea thinking media playback will be streamed via RDP too. What a weird architecture.
Great review!
how the hell did I only just realize the background wall's color is the Win 95 default desktop color
also obligatory *orson welles clapping furiously* anytime I see the original 360 blade interface, god it was so damn good.
Teal?
Looks more like 2000/me rather than 95.
So yeah, I was one of those people who bought an XB360 primarily to use it as a WMC Extender. I did eventually use the 360 for games too, but first and foremost I bought it to use WMC running on my desktop computer while sitting in front of my tv (without having to have a PC sitting in the home theater).
>be media center
>comically large profile that looks bigger than regular desktops
The original buyer would be pretty upset once they know a game console could do 80% of what this media center were designed to do, minus the funny Audiophile jacks
Whoops
You haven't met an audiophile have you?
There is a slight, very niche, benefit to blades firmware: for games that could run on it, there is a possibility that framerates and load times are slightly better. The Tony Hawk speedrunning community found that it was optimal to run Tony Hawk's Project 8 on blades firmware. very dumb! ultimately it doesn't matter though, it's possible to hack a 360 to restore the old firmware and get the same benefits
With the bloat they added, doesn't surprise me.
1:09:02 It's actually worse than snapping the solder balls off the motherboard; it'll actually snap the balls off the die that connect the die to the chip package. Or at least it'll do that most of the time and that's why reballing was such a crapshoot.
1:02:37 Padding their product line-up may have been precisely the reason for this kind of rebrand. As you note, the number of products they offer gives the illusion of a much larger company with broad expertise, which can foster customer trust. Spending a little bit of manpower for a quick rebrand out of pocket doesn't seem that wild considering the number of products which are sold at a (sometimes significant) loss, relying on cross subsidization.
Yeah I was guessing that while the thermal solution might have been fine for media playback, it wouldn't necessarily be able to cope with say Halo 3. Remember that there is a difference between thermal transfer capacity, and max allowable delta. A huge passive heatsink could easily be able to shift that much heat, but that doesn't mean it could do it fast enough under crunch to keep the chips from spiking outside of their operating range.
The fact that it was neither grounded nor double wall insulated was horrifying.
This is the Falcon, which didn't have the overheating issue.
Falcon still had overheating issues. I had one and it didn't ever red ring(of death) but would overheat. You turn it on, fans would ramp up to 100% and the system would show the overheating red ring for overheating. I tried repeating it but it didn't help...
Personally it looks better cooled than the Xboxes I have opened up before and It still has a fan... Although it's been a while since I'm have opened up a 360.
RUclips is a garbage fire
That heatsink looks better than its real thermal capability. Most of the area has high thermal impedance to heatpipes and isn't doing any work, and convection is fundamentally quite weak until you reach rather toasty temperatures. I'm quite certain the two fans blowing directly on heatpipes, even if it's a little unconventional, dissipate substantially more heat than the imposing looking external heatsink.
Had some custom fan less IPCs for a clean room delivered some years ago.
The behaved weird, sometimes didn't turn on, died randomly and no one had a clue. Had them go back for repair a few times without success.
One day I disconnected a Displayport cord while it was on, saw an arc and it was dead.
After that I got a DC clamp meter out, and put it on the Displayport cable. There where over 6 Amps DC from the power brick cable thru the mainboard, over the Displayport cable shield, Monitor, it's power cable earth, the earth cable in the wall and than back to the power brick. It was wild!
They all had a bad chassis ground connection from the power brick.
Had them redo the barrel jack on the back plate and since then they worked without any issues.
By 2008, the Falcon revision 360 (which is almost definitely what this is) would've cured the Red Ring completely since the new GPU it had didn't have issues anymore. That was not just bad, flexy PCB's but also ATI chips that were badly manufactured because this was the early days of RoHS and nobody knew how to do it right (similar story to what got Nvidia with Bumpgate, which led to the PS3's Yellow Light of Death).
Did you test it with the Microsoft HD DVD player add-on? Its just mind-bendingly hilarious how this version fixes some of the early / launch XBOX 360 design flaws
lol didn't think of that
I don't think those don't play games tho.
I intend to test that in episode 3 :D
@@Fay7666 they can
Lol I remember this twist from one of your thrift videos so it doesn't land as much but it's still really amusing that they did this.
he also showed the xbox 360 startup animation at the end of the first niveus video
This is only tangentially related but I’ve never seen anyone else ever talk about this: when the update came to the 360 that allowed it to rip games to the hard drive, it came with the claim that it wouldn’t speed up loading by that much because games weren’t designed for it. Well, there was one extremely odd exception: Armored Core for answer (yes that’s its name) had a menu for loading mech configurations, but opening said menu took an irritatingly long time, with two loading screens, a short fake out loading screen and second much longer screen. For some reason, installing the game on the 360 completely cut out the second longer screen, I have no idea why other than it possibly being a vestigial PS3 function that somehow started working again, and I have never seen anyone else mention it online.
I love the oddball hardware you find and the context you can bring to the table.
All that attention to mechanical design, and then they run analog AV wiring across the RF-rich environment of an active motherboard using unshielded, not even twisted wires to the back panel RCA jacks *shakes head*. I'm a mechanical engineer and know that's a bargin-bin electronics move.
that’s probably the best preserved blades dash 360 to date
I not only needed this level of information for this topic, but for ALL topics! Long form videos like this enrich my life so much and I really appreciate the amount of work you put in to them. I'd be down for even longer videos tbh.. so don't worry about runtime ;3
You hit the nail right on the head. This was likely a rushed product to meant to fill in that gap before proper stuff came out that they could sell/rebrand.
April/May is when Contractors renovate rich people's homes in the Hamptons. They want products to install - Preferably a whole system of products from a single vendor. If this thing was the only Vista Media Center compatible complete lineup, that could have been a big deal. Making custom chassis would have probably been more expensive, and taken too much time, so they just reused something they already had
- This much I can speculate as someone who has worked in that area for multiple summers. You see a lot of custom made stuff from small companies you never heard of, like a custom stand up fans with legs that look like an antique brass telescope. - But if you have a good enough eye you can tell it was a standard Lasko fan put into a new housing.
Man i kinda figured what the core concept was when you mentioned the Edge being an Xbox back in your thrift haul video, but i had no idea it had a legitimate purpose.
Side note, this would be a dream to mod and load games off an external drive, assuming the wifi for the controllers is still enabled. It'd almost be like an oversized Wii.
There were plenty if add-on rear fan accessories that sucked additional air out of the back of the 360 using a pass through power connector. Still have one on my launch 360. All they wouldve needed was spade connectors or a massive solder blob at that point? They were all pretty crappy plastic so shucking them wouldn't have been hard and I recall them costing
I have been waiting for this day!
This video was released a couple of minutes ago. Are you a time traveler? Haha! 🌈
Sign up for patreon. I watched it days ago…
Been waiting for this; honestly was exactly what I expected. This thing is great but terrifying at the same time.
"Don't worry, I'll bury the lede." The man knows his audience.
High end customers are a client base that's very stressful to have. I totally understand why they worked under such panic, they made promises to some big shots that they were terrified to disappoint.
honestly its kind of a shame they took out the disc drive, if i was a wealthy, image focused, mid-00's guy id be so down for a classy-looking Xbox with fancy custom cooling to make it run quieter... but i guess if i was that guy id probabky scoff at Gears of War so its probabky a good thing im not
Yeah, the HD era of games (7th gen) was the time game companies were bending over backwards to make gaming look more "mature" with its gritty reboots and a color palette of brown, brown, brown, and gray.
Don't apologize for the length of your videos - this (as always) was an excellent documentary. Strong work.
As someone building multiple silent yet heavily overclocked PC cases out of cheapest particle board in very early 2000s I can appreciate this. Good times... grinding the links on an AMD Duron CPU I just got from my small student stipend was both scary and satisfying.
I remember Windows Media Center being very popular. When it was removed from later Microsoft operating systems there were still people trying to get it installed in these OS. I was never a fan of Windows Media Center. More of a KODI fan. Originally known as Xbox Media Player (XBMP) then Xbox Media Center (XBMC) for its ability to be installed on the original modded Xbox gaming consoles. With a more user friendly interface, ease of use, worked on low power systems, high media compatibility and most of all free to use.
love your brief on audiophile stuff at the beginning. the most hilarious product I ever saw was an optical SPDIF cable with gold plated connectors. I shit you not. Everyone of course knows that there's zero electrical conduction through an optical SPDIF cable, and indeed that is the entire point. "Separating a fool from their money, a morally neutral act" indeed!
this is just a nitpick, but the 360 doesn't show any errors if the DVD drive is missing. it flashes the power LED rapidly instead (the one niveus used for their custom power LED).
second nitpick, still watching the video.
the 360 GPUs desoldering wasn't the issue. you can resolder a dead GPU a thousand times, and it'll fix nothing. the underfill on the GPU itself is the problem.
I remember this period and recall trying to convince my parents to get a 360 for “just the media center” lol. Also what a great in depth video. This is the first video I’ve seen of yours but I’m in. Cheers
Went aboard a superyacht back in 2003 when the America's Cup was in Auckland, NZ. It was fitted with some kind of media center server somewhere and a black Xbox 360 connected to every TV, that acted as media center extenders and had a library of preloaded games.
There was some kind of very fast internet connection (could have been an ethernet cable out the window, they were tied to a dock), but everything still worked offline, so you could be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and still play some multiplayer games using "system link" or stream from a large library of movies and TV series stored on a server somewhere.
That server, somewhere in the racks of no-expense-spared navigation, communications, line of business, audio and video gear may well have been one of these Niveus units. Even the grey, white and gold aesthetic wouldn't have looked out of place.
btw, the wireless controller that actually does the connection to the xbox controllers is also on that front panel. literally right next to the ring of LEDs. you can even solder USB wires to it and use it like a normal 360 dongle :)
My god, he went almost the entire video without saying Red Ring. Gotta be a record for ANY video featuring the 360.
I guess you didn't watch the video huh
I'm surprised it didn't come up until 1 hour 9 minutes into the video!
@@neb_setabed Nah I'm just dumb of ass.
@pdawg1555 he told us ut was an Xbox way before that. However, is it really ever an Xbox if it doesn't have the possibility of RROD? LOL
Re: the powerfall (or whatever) units like that were extremely popular in some university and hospital locations that had MRI scanners. MRI scans were *huge* for the time (late 90s - early 2000s) so the capability to have many of them online and available within a couple of minutes was a real game changer.
Thank you for the °C numbers! Appreciate it ❤️
Before Vista and the Xbox 360, Microsoft did sell a kit to use the original Xbox as a Media Center Extender for XP. It included a software DVD, a remote, and the same IR/decoder dongle that came with the DVD movie playback kit (though the remote was different).
The performance of the media browser on the original Xbox was just as sluggish as the Linksys extender you have. As far as I know, only the Xbox 360 ran smoothly as an XP extender. My guess is the MCE client in the 360 is some sort of proprietary build unique to the 360 (kind of like how it was the only extender to support both versions for so long).
Microsoft never did update the original Xbox extender kit to work with Vista.
Media Center is really worth for me remembered back in mid-2000s even I was young. Nice PlayStation Shirt.
In 2004, I built a "Media Centre PC" based on an Athlon64 and a Radeon X800 running MythTV on Gentoo (64bit). It included quite a few custom modifications. It output interlaced Component Video with field synchronisation to the video renderer allowing interlaced video to be played directly. It also included a digital TV tuners and a CAM i which I modified to clone the Nagra decoder ID for my pay TV servive, so I could just use the card.
I also wrote a PHP web interface to remotely access the content, which I even streamed dynamically re-encoded to my Nokia phone, albeit with very low resolution and bitrate!
36:18 I literally just learned today by clicking a random website that there are flexible heat pipes made for high vibration environments or challenging installation. Though not a very good sign it's for consumers when custom, aerospace, and military shows up in the datasheet.
New CRD? An hour long?? I'm here for it.
In US electrical stuff, you can use a screw to bond the outlet box to a metal wire box (the part in the wall). The NEC says this is enough grounding. The reciptical does need to be grounded through wire first though. This is only the ground for the box.
56:28 this gives me a heavy throwback to my old job lol
Don't forget that people were also buying PS3's *as* a Blu-ray player. for a shockingly long time after Blu-rays hit the shelves, it was more cost effective to buy a PS3 as a blu-ray player. same thing with the PS2.
I recon microsoft saw sony enjoying their limelight and was like "huh what if we did that too with something we already own" and made it so. and MS was definitely kicking themselves from the OG xbox not having a DVD player until you bought the remote (which was basically just a DOLBY licensing DRM dongle and cost cutting measure on their end)
Considering every single Xbox was sold at a loss... probably for the better.
Almost any other company? Eh... history is littered with companies that sold the consoles at a significant loss and never recouped it with fees. Microsoft? They've bankrolled the Xbox project through 20 years, they were the only ones where they could afford to use the first console as a loss leader for the eventual profit on the 360.
(until they all RRoD'd, that is)
It was possible to break out of the WMC interface on the receiver and access the desktop, used to do it on the Xbox 360. A few people made emulators that could be ran via this method.
I remember trying the extender on both the OG Xbox and 360 back in the day but ended up just sticking to XBMC/Kodi on the OG Xbox because of various issues IIRC e.g. high bandwidth (an issue over the wifi connection), codecs, etc.
IIRC Orb on the Wii was a more reliable method than trying to use this thanks to it's built in transcoder, obviously this was pre-plex.
That said, IIRC I had to install extra codecs on WMC anyway to make it practical for video playback. The only time I'd say I had success with WMC was on the host PC, typically my laptop when I was away from home and viewing from a distance/TV with a remote.
Even though I got spoiled by early appearence of the Edge in the thrift video, I still got surprised by the video because I never knew that you can use 360 as a WMC repeater.
I have been waiting for this follow-up, and it did not disappoint
That thermal solution is a thing of beauty.
man, i love the aesthetics of those things, they looks so good with the brushed black/blue alluminum.
if i had the money i'd just get those two just for that
When the Edge rebooted I loudly hit my desk in a mix of anger and shock.
Truly unexpected.
This is like an enormous little guy. Which sounds paradoxical but when you look at it that makes sense to me.
Man I hope someone gets in your inbox with the skills to result in a video of you booting games on this thing.
This was awesome; as always.
the blades UI absolutely has advantages over subsequent updates. i dont love it for nostalgia, I love it because from a UI/UX nerd POV it is incredibly well designed and makes it incredibly easy to find and do the things you want to do. wheras subsequent UIs are visually cluttered, hard to intuitively navigate, and hide features behind several superfluous button presses and screens
I have already written this as a reply to an existing comment, but I have to say it here too. CRD and Technology Connections are the only channels from which I'm able to watch an hour long video, especially considering ADHD. They both script their videos in an absolutely informative, hilarious and focus-oriented way so that despite appearing boring in the thumbnail, the content of the video is and has been entertaining through and through. 😊
Every one of your videos makes me want to run to someone and say “OMG! Can you freakin’ believe this?!” But then I realize the only people who would find this interesting are probably already watching this video. I’ve literally had a conversation in my head along the lines of “Man, who should I tell about this? Who’s that guy…? Oh, right, that’s me.”
Please keep this up. I love this dive into the failed potential and the self-sabotage at Microsoft around Windows Media Center and the whole Green Button community. Heck, I had a Windows Media Server. I was a believer.
Fascinating kit. My biggest problem with it isn't the shoddy engineering, it's the fact that you'd be buying physical hardware that was entirely dependent on features in a specific version of Windows. By definition, it's going to be out of date - or perhaps even non-functional - in a few years. I think enthusiasts investing in a home theatre setup would have known this and put their money into something with a slightly longer shelf life. In my case, that was a simple Samba server and decent network.
49:19 Besides confusing messaging in the system UI, in this case the main problem caused by deleting the DVD drive is that the 360 flashes the power LED while the tray is moving (or, while the tray is not in the state that the 360 is asking it to be). This would cause the power LED on the front of the device to flash permanently, hence the need to trick it into thinking it has a closed drive.
I am pretty sure they removed the DVD drive to keep up the illusion of having developed their own device some more.
If you had to go to the blade dashboard to play a DVD and manually switch back to the media center later, the 'illusion' would have been ruined.
How are some of these comments days older than the video? OMGWTFBBQ!? Did I find a wormhole? Another great video by CRD. You have to admire Niveus's ambition. The switch the Vista and the lack of Media Extenders may have left Niveus with a stack of pre-existing orders they could not fulfill until they came up with an extender. And they needed to ship that stack of orders for cash flow- to get money sunk in yet unmovable inventory to pay their bills. They may have "engineered" this whole thing over one "work through the nights" weekend. Necessity may breed innovation, but desperation breeds sloppy work. In an alternate timeline I could see Niveus selling premium fanless cases for quiet gaming rigs- getting enough of a market to actually have some economies of scale and use more normal production facilities to get the cost way way down for it to make more sense. There are industrial applications where fanless designs are preferred so there are not any moving parts to fail, and industrial applications can absorb cottage industry prices. Niveus could have made it if they gave up on the whole media center thing. But that was their dream.. so I guess that doesn't matter now.
Videos can be pre-released to his patreon members who leave comments.
@@mysticmarble94 Ahhhhhh. Thank you for explaining that.
Was fully waiting for you de-solder that pin and plug in the DVD drive at the end.
That dvd rom drive just lived in your head rent free until this was published huh Gravis?😂😂 great video! Stream o thon planned anytime ? You deserve it. Hope you’re well! Keep pushing,your channel is one of my favorites. Thank you
Working in the RV industry I've seen swanky things like this were the company just couldnt put an xbox 360 beside a TV oh no so they create a custom cabinet to house it with extensions but often enough the custom parts fail before the device is either obsolete or broken costing the customer even more money. But I guess when your paying a few million dollars for an RV that's thr gist. But I have never seen a set up quite like this. This thing is like next level to that
Bro, I'll be honest. I have no idea what you're talking about most of the time, but I love hearing you explain it to other people.
Watching this with a raspberry pi 4 cooled with a 12V SILENX fan running at 5V over USB. The Edge internal fan probably has VHB tape under it rated at a gazillion lbs. As you said, the Edge looks like a fantabulous unfinished POC. I would have been proud to present that at a meeting, but dismayed that it went into production as is.
Niveus missed a selling point if they had kept the DVD drive - it was a Windows Media Centre extender that could also play Xbox games. I'm sure there was someone who lived in a mansion that wanted WMC and figured "hey why not, I'll play some Halo or something" down the road. I mean, people in mansions have kids sometimes so...?
EDIT after actually watching the conclusion: whoops never mind lmao
this was not a slog! this was wonderful. I really wish i could support you on patreon but i cant atm
1:10:21 I just want to say that those stories are what drew me to stay here, well among other things maybe but all this info I had probably most of the times never heard about is damn interesting :)
34:53 “We’ll need that later for sure” - I sense foreshadowing
Would definitely love to see you try to hook a drive up to this and test out the cooling under real gaming conditions.
51:57 The raw emotion here is very strong.
I would love for you to publish an interview with the CEO of Niveus and other people working at the company. It might make a good full-length documentary.
Okay, that "cutting an ice cube with a heat pipe" bit looks VERY familiar to me. Did he do that bit in a previous video?
Yep, I recycled it from the first episode in this series!
Please, please connect an optical drive and run games on this.
This is, by far, my favorite video you have made. Great work!
Man. Sorry to shatter your dreams. But I doubt CRD would JTAG or RGH this... Just too rare tbh. And that's the only way to play optical games. (DVD drives are locked on the Xb360)
Just the fact that it has the blade interface might make this thing worth a ton. I wonder what version its running
The context is what makes your videos really stand out
I think I knew about the secret from cohost, but I still yelled in shock when the boot screen showed up.
Nicely done! Love the long form. I wonder if they didn't connect the ground to the chassis due to ground loops?
The video was really entertaining. It's crazy what adventures some companies go on. If I had bought the device and unscrewed it as usual, I would probably have laughed myself to death.
You need a mechanical, non-soldered connection between the mains ground pin and the chassis if you want UL or just about any legit certification for your metal chassis product.
That's interesting - non-soldered is a requirement? Is that why ground wires always seem to be crimp ring lugs? I remember a long, long time ago I was talking to someone who was making cable harnesses for military vehicles and they said that crimp-on butt splices were considered on-par or better than solder, wondering if this is related.
@@CathodeRayDude I'm an EE and I used to work at UL many years ago and part of my time there i worked on information technology equipment (UL1950/IEC60950). I can safely (ha-ha) say that this contraption didn't have a chance in hell of meeting the requirements, simply for the hack job they did with the x-box power supply. One of the main purposes of safety certification is to test and verify (both during the initial testing and subsequent factory inspections) isolation and grounding. Once they broke open the power supply, all safety related work done on it went out the window, since now a single fault such as a wire or a component in the power supply touching the chassis, would electrify it. And since there's no ground path through the power cord, electricity would find the next best path and go through the human touching it. The whole point of grounding the metal chassis is, if it is electrified, high current rushes from live to ground and pops the circuit breaker, keeping the user from harm. Another interesting point is that as far as i know, selling information technology equipment without safety certification is by code not allowed, which obviously didn't bother these guys.
Anyway, I would have never known about this equipment if it wasn't for your video. So thanks.
i like this new release schedule