Cheers for all the suggestions, I certainly have a lot to go at! Good bye social life!
I soft modded mine with unleashx and whacked xbmc on it. Other than playback of 720p rips are slow, I can't fault it. Using the pad is much better than using a wireless media centre keyboard as well.
It is THE emulation machine. Got N64, PSX and more importantly SNES and Mega Drive (genesis to any Americans on here). A mate of mine has also gone out and bought one which I modded last night, and now my brother wants one in his room for streaming content off my network.
Best £15 I have ever spent
Only setback I have is the size of the xbox hard drive. I've tried using xboxhdm so I can use a spare IDE drive I have, got past the first screen where you select option one. Reached the point you type in xboxhd but then I get errors which state linux cannot be found. I've tried re burning it as well at 1x speed.
Still I shall persevere, I will get there eventually.