This open-source app was Plex before Plex even existed

Before Plex made personal media servers something a normal person could set up in an afternoon, a group of hackers took a game console and turned it into something Microsoft never intended it to be. That became the foundation for nearly every home media center concept. Not many people know the history of Plex and Kodi , but it's really interesting and shows that the next tech revolution may come from a random home project.

Hackers turned the original Xbox into a media center

The first Xbox started the media center era

Home media centers have existed longer than most people realize. It started with people who figured out how to hack Microsoft's original Xbox . When the console launched in late 2001, Microsoft made it like most other consoles, so it was pretty locked down. However, the Xbox was a lot more like a regular PC than the next iterations were.

The original Xbox has an Intel Pentium III chip and an NVIDIA graphics card . That probably made it great for those who wanted to tinker with it. It was likely done with modchips or software exploits; either way, hackers managed to strip away Microsoft's restrictions and run their own unofficial code on the hardware.

When users could get into the Xbox, they started building media playback software independently. Many of these hackers came together to make the Xbox Media Player, or XBMP. This early build was not like we'd think, but a few years into it, the whole thing was rebuilt, and it became the Xbox Media Center , or XBMC.

The goal from the start was to take all your local video, music, and photos and pull them together into a single, clean UI for your TV. Instead of going through your computer desktop, you could sit on your couch and browse everything with an Xbox controller or a DVD remote.

Since the Xbox only came with an 8GB to 10GB hard drive , you could stream over a home network through SMB, so you could pull video files directly from your PC without moving them anywhere. However, that was pretty ambitious, and you had to own the hardware to use it. XBMC also scraped the web for movie posters and metadata, so it looked like a real media library, much like Plex would end up having.

The original Xbox hardware came with a 733 MHz processor and 64MB of memory, which couldn't handle H.264 high-definition video. That ended up being a good thing, because it meant developers could port it over to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Kodi and Plex are built on that foundation

Kodi and Plex feel like two sides of the same coin

From the Xbox project came Kodi. Kodi is built around the idea that everything lives on your own hardware. It works with your local files and network shares and has no interest in cloud storage or remote servers. All the heavy lifting happens right on the device doing the playback. So indexing your library, managing your files, and decoding video happens thanks to the software handling it locally.

To make a hard drive full of movies actually easy to browse on a TV, Kodi did a few things that nobody else had really figured out yet. It went out and grabbed metadata for you like posters, fan art, cast lists, and plot summaries without you needing to use a browser. It pulled from databases like IMDb and TheTVDB automatically.

It also lets you completely redesign the interface using XML-based skins, so if you don't like how it looked, you could change it. On top of that, a plugin system built around Python scripts lets outside developers add all kinds of extras like weather, video streaming, new remote control options, and more. A lot of what we now expect from media center software started here.

Plex, which is now arguably the biggest name in personal media streaming, didn't come out of nowhere. It started like Kodi, which came from XBMC . Plex was built directly on top of what Xbox and Kodi had already proven was possible. It took that open-source foundation and built something for a much bigger audience.

From there, the two went in opposite directions in terms of how they actually work. Kodi stayed true to its original design. Basically, Kodi is local first without an account, and you don't need an outside connection to use it.

Plex took a different path entirely, with its central Plex Media Server handling the library scanning, the metadata, and the database. It also introduced on-the-fly transcoding, which means the server re-encodes video and audio in real time to match whatever device is playing it back.

Picking between Kodi and Plex comes down to convenience

Kodi falls short in some areas compared to Plex

The original idea has taken a big turn with Kodi and Plex. Xbox didn't really force you into one camp, and when XBMC was first made, it was a pioneer. There weren't rules; it was just amazing to see it work. However, Kodi and Plex went two different ways with it.

I think Kodi's complexity kept it from ever going mainstream the way Plex did. Since Kodi was built around a local-first architecture, it puts heavy emphasis on the user. Something as basic as syncing your watch history across two devices in the same house meant manually setting up a shared SQL database and digging through config files. Most people aren't going to do that.

Plex decided to focus on the user first, so the team built something totally different. It is a lot more friendly to someone who doesn't understand much about open software networks. That's what brought in the mainstream audience.

Regardless of what camp you fall into, you're going to have to make a choice or use both at the same time in some way. Either way, it's a motivator to start tinkering with devices outside their intended use. A team of people helped make the media servers that we know today by just deciding to see what they could do. I doubt they even thought about the two camps that would form later; they likely just had an idea and went for it.

Plex and Kodi might owe their existence to Xbox

Regardless of why they exist, there will be people arguing about the differences between Kodi and Plex. I say both are good, and it really depends on you. Either way, it's really cool to know that this huge competition only exists because of a project started by console hackers in the days of the original Xbox.