"I went all out for my Xbox and bought Logitech's Harmony Xbox 360 Remote, which integrates your 360 with the rest of your home theater beautifully."

FYI, the ordinary Harmony remotes can control a 360 as well (not PS3 or Wii, though, until they implement Bluetooth). I strongly recommend getting one.

cdammers

What I don't like about the media center extender is the fact that it takes quite a bit to open it from 360. So I've never used it anymore beside I can access all the media files from the dashboard.. although I have to admit it's not pretty.

This isn't a flame bait but rather a fact. With PS3, everything is ready out of the box. You don't need to do a wifi hack nor silence your fan. So it's more convenient. Although I don't think 360 is really that worse that you need to replace the fan, you only notice it when playing games.

But yea as the other reader point out, if you have an xbox sitting around and do nothing, xbmc is the best solution there is. Not to mention an article yesterday about this great skin called plex for XBMC, makes it even better. Nice!

Playstation

I don't have an Xbox 360 (though I've been considering one), but is it really wise to change out the fans considering the high incidence of RRoD errors?

Colage

@luketheobscure: Well sure, that's probably cheaper than having a purpose-built computer solely for sharing files, but if you already have a computer, it makes more sense to just stream.

Spyrojoe

I just play games. Though, I read somewhere that you can use the Zune connectivity to make your own themes. I haven't tried it yet, but I intend to when I have the time to figure it out.

LUCYMONO

I find the title of this article kinda funny. I mean it is pretty obvious Ms (and Sony) have been foisting nongaming functionality down our throats for years now.

Having said that I do plan on getting a 360 and look forward to some of the convergence functionality and to finding a cheaper WiFi solution.

griffinrider

I have a 'known bug' that sometimes you simply cannot connect your computer to your 360. I tried my computer, my girlfriends computer, my laptop, a friends laptop, all to no avail. I even had someone who has the media functionality working on theirs try on mine, and it simply doesn't work.

The amusing thing is, it worked for ten minutes. [i]Ten minutes[/i] and then suddenly stopped. Woo...

Also, why would I use my 360 like this when I could just use my PC itself?

Durandal

@TanyaP: did you download the "Optional Media Update"?

uzivatel

I use my 360 for gaming, and my original xbox with XBMC for all of my media center functionality.

suburbancowboy

Connect360 works really well, I use it quite a lot, especially now that I would otherwise need twp cable adapters to plug my laptop into the television, and this way I don't have to plug anything in.

Another thing that you can do just plug in an external USB hard drive or iPod and play files directly off of it (although this doesn't seem to work with the Touch for some reason). This has the added benefit of charging the iPod, plus you can play the music while gaming.

tk.

This is all overkill... I've got a little portable hard drive that I copy all my media to and have it hooked up to my xbox 360. It's a lot easier than having a dedicated computer running just to stream the media over the network. Every couple of weeks I just hook the hard drive up to my computer and dump any new media over. Voilà.

luketheobscure

Recently I obtained the Red Rings of Death on my console and due to my distance from the US I had no access to any microsoft customer support. I had to get this fixed so the locals fixed the wiring (I assume) and installed a "better fan" (it is very loud). Voila, no more RRoD but how safe is this, warranty aside?

Wargames91

You can also send RSS feeds to your Xbox 360 by using XB Stream (xbstream.com). It takes RSS and turns them into images that you can view on your 360 as pictures with the ability to turn pages by using LB and RB.
Very neat, I've used it off and on for quite a while...It's a little resource heavy...still a good program.

And Media Center functionality sucks in most cases for the 360. I just use Windows Media Player to stream the content and I can watch ANY avi file I want (there are a few exceptions).

AryzonaBay

last night i was trying to get my netflix to stream on my 360 and there was a codec issue every time. anyone know a solution to this one?

TanyaP

Very cool stuff. It seems like Media Center Edition is the way to get the most out of it. Even with last years update there are still issues with some audio codecs out there. Depending on the source for your video files they may not play.

ElijahDProphet

So you mean you can do something else than just play awful shootans?

Lootskin

This is hilarious. I just bought a new lap top and turned it on and my 360 and the Media Center extender pop-up. I have the Harmony remote, and a Wireless Router. I didn't plan on any of this but I spent a few hours last night playing with it.

I didn't know I could stream my Netflix so thank you for opening my eyes.

Daymonster

I am with luketheobscure, just load up a bunch of media on a WD Passport which doesn't need a separate power supply and plug it into the Xbox 360 for music, movies, and tv shows.

zanthian

2 things.
The pelican air flow adds a fan to the back and a vga out and a hdmi audio port aswell as 4 usb ports and It comes with a 5 year warranty if it ruins your system for people worried about it frying your system. Did I mention its sold at Gamestop for 20 dollars!?
video review:

+ Watch video

goatmale

Haha, nowadays, everything is a media center. My Wii, my friend's PS3, and her brother's 360.

All 3 of them are being used as media centers as well as regular consoles.

Ender15

You can use ushare [ushare.geexbox.org] on ubuntu and stream videos to your xbox 360 as well as music.

rkhwaja

@cdammers: True, but the 360 branded one has the 360 buttons, making some features a wee bit easier. I believe the 550 and the 360 vs are the same remote, at the same price.

balls187 upside yo head

I was going to say, the 3rd party internal fans for the 360 probably manage to be quieter by using crappy sleeve-bearings. But no, apparently they use ball-bearings.

Another way to try to get it quieter is shown with sound dampening: [extremetech.com]
It only resulted in a 4-5 dB difference, though.

Captain Bringdown

Is this the guide to create your own "Frankeins-Box"?

PowerButton

I watch videos I have on a NAS drive from the dashboard. Extender is too slow for me, and can't hang with xvid/divx. Way cheaper to just have a NAS drive on, than have a PC hosting it.

I probably watch more video than I play games.

StartingAces

I'm still on Windows 2000, so I use TVersity on the office PC to stream to the 360, which is connected via a wireless-G bridge along with all the other consoles and whatnot under the TV. The interface is a bit clunky (although there's a new, better-looking version out now which I haven't tried yet) but it streams most things that I've thrown at it, and the 360 does a great job of determining the appropriate aspect ratio as well. Basically, it "just worked".

For the iTunes collection which is on the Mac, I use Connect360. It works well, but seems to choke on large libraries, so I typically only share whatever I want to play as opposed to all x thousand songs. Same deal for iPhoto. I don't think our old mini is powerful enough to deal with video streaming so I leave that to the PC.

The PS3, btw, didn't seem to do as good a job of playing a wide range of media, and of course the lack of Harmony integration is a pain. So I'll stick with the 360.

rollog60

=/ I just use my ps3 and a remote. Next article should be tricking out your PS3 for media centerssss.

-_- I've been too lazy lately to mess with this stuff and plus now that I'm 360-less I can only mess with my friend's 360 :D hope he's still under warranty BWUAHAHAHA

Megan Fox iz Hot ^-^ -ph15h

I'm having the same issue as a couple of other posters here. My 360 refuses to reconize my PC while my PC knows my 360 is there. The funny thing is, last year before either the spring or fall update, it worked fine. I have disabled everything on my PC that could ressemble a firewall and nothing. I've followed the directions on xbox.com and ever called xbox support. They couldn't help me. Told me I had to call the company that made my router so I could get some ports or something. They told me I couldn't get any info from them since my router was out of warrenty (even though it wasn't). Any chance anyone here could give me and the other a hand on this situation?

Cyco

@zmnatz: @00 orb also works with the wii. Only it converts things to flash because that's all the wii web browser can play. Not the best for video but it works great for music.

zmnatz

Theres a program for windows called orb that streams media to the 360 just fine. That's what I use. As an added bonus, it allows you to stream live TV to the 360 (not through media center extender) if you have a tv tuner. Also, it lets you stream all your media to any internet connected device including another laptop that you may have (great for watching TV during college classes).

Also, the remote that manufacturers with any media center PC usually works with the 360. At least the one that came with my HP laptop does.

zmnatz

...that compact, networked PC sitting under your television...

Should read: "that compact, noisy, power-hungry, prone to failure, small-hard drived networked PC sitting under your television."

palexc

Can this sort of feature be done with the Wii? Please?

Any idea on how to get it to support anything besides flash (youtube, etc. gets old fast)

OO

Not to start a flame war or anything - I have my Xbox set up like this too - but the PS3 is compatible with Media Extender too so you can get almost all of the same functionality with a PS3...actually somewhat better suited for it with Blueray, it's built in wireless, and it's greater quiet factor...

GettinMyGooseOn

It's funny how all of this could be achieved by just connecting your PC's video card output to your HDTV.

gencid

Would love to see one of these done for the PS3. Just got mine about a month ago and am still trying to figure everything out. Good work.

RHazlett

@all re: uShare: Thanks for the heads up! I'm updating the post.

Adam Pash

@Playstation:
Everything is not ready out of the box on the PS3, hardware wise maybe with the wireless and all but media center wise, nope. I use both my PS3 and 360 for streaming stuff and I keep finding the PS3 either doesn't recognize, or says far more videos are corrupt than my 360 (mostly XVID stuff). Disappointing, especially since my PS3 recognizes VUZE (bittorent client) on my PC as a media server but doesn't like playing what I get from there. I share that directory with my 360 and the stuff plays fine without transcoding it. Once they support more Codecs the PS3 will be a force to recon with though.

NotNormal23224

Is it just me or does the dashboard ui take forever to navigate. I've got a lot of media and it seems to take forever to find something, and I have to start over each time. Is there an easier way?

Is there a way to scrobble (last.fm) songs that play over games?

SamburgerHandwich

Still looks like a feminine napkin dispenser to me...and there's nothing stopping Microsoft from screwing every single person who bought these when the next version comes out, as they did with the first XBOX. Oh, and how about that HD-DVD player? Oh, right...they don't exist anymore...

bmoredlj

"Media support used to be fairly limited (and still could use expanded support)"

No doubt, and it's still sorely lacking in a variety of areas, and transcode360 is no solution. I mean, it might be acceptable for some people, but frankly on an HDTV the quality sucks. This isn't a fault of transcode360, it does exactly as intended, it's reencoding video on the fly, no small feat.

The fact remains is that we shouldn't HAVE to do that, and it's a shame Microsoft is so behind in terms of the standards it supports.

aphex242

I have never been able to get my 360 to see my PC....I want it to dammit! Weird, my PC sees my 360 tho.....

djpojack

For Linux, in addition to uShare, there's:

Fuppes:
[fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de]

TwonkyVision:
[www.twonkyvision.de]

MediaTomb:
[mediatomb.cc]

Fuppes will transcode, but it can be hard to setup.

Twonky is commercial, and has ports for various OS's.

MediaTomb is still a little rough. It reminds me of Ushare.

CraigHoffman

My media PC's headless, so I use Ultra VNC for keeping it in shape - mce buddy's also a great little program for automatically converting mce recordings to less space-hungry formats, and since mce's a bit sluggish on the 360, I use WebGuide to manage my recording schedule from my laptop - still need to figure out how to get it working on my N95 though, that would be pretty cool.
I picked up all of these apps from lifehacker posts.

Johnjoe0110

@Cyco: I'm also having the same problem. PC knows it's there, but the 360 can't connect. I followed all instructions, disabled Windows Firewall, AVG, opened the correct ports, etc. Still nothing. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be much-o obliged-o.

lankysob

TAG for later

NiGHTSSTUDiO

A 'Vs.' article between Orb and TVersity would actually be a good topic for an article guys.

Please consider it.

L.Rawlins

Orb.com

L.Rawlins

@cdammers: www.ir2bt.com at last we have PS3-Harmony... harmony. I've got one, and it works great. They even have a macro for turning off the PS3, but it takes ~5 seconds for it to execute.

Keen314

Like I said above, a 360 in your living room is much quieter than just any PC under your TV

I have a PC hooked up (Vista MC) and my 360. I can't hear the PC at all, but you can certainly tell once you turn on the 360.

You don't realize how loud the 360 is until you turn it off.

bglav

I converted some of my video files to .mp4 so the xbox360 could play them, but since I don't have media center edition on my PC and have to share through wmp11, I can't put the files in my media player library to share them (wmp11 doesn't play/recognize .mp4 files but 360 does)!? Anybody have any idea how to get around this?

CommenterKeen

I have been using the 360 since I bought it as a Windows Media center extender. I originally was using Windows XP Media center edition 2005 Sp2, and have since updated to Vista Home premium. I have a dedicated PC with dual TV tuners hooked up in my office which is no where near our bedroom "where we watch all of our videos" and I love the experience I get. Mine is hooked up through a router and is wired directly to the network for the best experience.
Using a portable hard drive/Ipod may work great for some, but if you want to watch live TV or if you have over 700 Gigs of pre recorded TV, and your computer is in a remote location the best way to accomplish this is using the Xbox 360 as an extender through your computer.

sauronringlord12

I've been frustrated by how little of my media windows media center seems to recognize. I've enabled "watch" for the appropriate folders but WMC finds less than 1500 of my 6000 mp3s (managed by iTunes but not in ACC format) and none of my ripped dvds. The interface also seems slow and awkward. I've read and tried to follow the lifehacker guide to ripping dvds but can't get WMC to find the content.

lucabrazi

I don't own Windows Media Center or Vista with Media Center, so I had to find a different solution. I just use TVersity to stream all my media to my Xbox. It will also subscribe to video RSS feeds like YouTube and such.

It streams everything my computer can play, transcoding it on-the-fly. Works great.

Perhaps when I use Vista someday I will use Media Center so I can do Netflix streaming.

SubKamran

@Adam, other uShare users:

I finally got around to setting up uShare this weekend, having played a little with Fuppes in the past. Fuppes is powerful but has serious shortcomings with regards to adding new files to it's "Virtual Folders" system - effectively having to rebuild the database when you add a new file.

uShare is much simpler, but the XBox 360 compatibility mode in the core release has problems with certain mime types. I found a variant that's been patched to fix these problems while maintaining XB360 compatibility at Netou. There's a HOWTO on the ubuntuforums.org website that tells you how to compile for Ubuntu (it's about 5-6 command lines, nothing complex), although I did need to upgrade my Kubuntu version from 7.04 to 7.10 to get it to install.

Digitalwanderer

Funny, I wrote about doing this with an iMac and a 360 on my blog a couple of weeks ago. I've been totally satisfied with using Connect360/iTunes. So much so that I use Handbrake to rip/encode all of my DVDs and just stream them rather than using physical discs. I may eventually move the media to NAS since I'm running outta space on the iMac. I will say this, however. Vista Media Center is slooooow on the 360. I can make supper before I have full control of the menu. Give me the Media blade with Connect360 any day.

jarek91

@Marcus.Mancini: The only thing that could cause such a problem is the fan hack (which I mentioned above. Everything else falls more or less within intended use, and I've never heard of anyone getting booted for XBL for any of it. At the very least, I can vouch for not having been booted. :)

Adam Pash

Just as a safe-check - is there anything listed here that would then prevent me from being able to go on XboxLive? I know XBMC on my 360 would do such a thing and thought it would be best to check. Thanks!

Marcus.Mancini

Connect360 is an absolutely killer app. I love it. Have it connected to my Mac over powerline, and it can handle HD media (far better than wifi ever could).

digitalhen

The PC media streaming stuff on this and the PS3 is pretty cool, but my apt is small enough I just drilled a hole in the wall and ran audio and video cables right from my comp to my home theatre. Granted, not everyone has that option, but I'm happy I was able to cut out the middle man.

dry-roasted-peanuts

My solution to the XBox 360 networking question was to get a cheap or used Linksys WRT54G home router, install DD-WRT on it, and configure it for client bridge mode, plug the 360 into it, which sees it as a normal old 10/100 wired Ethernet connection.

This has the added benefit of providing 3-4 additional ethernet hookups in my entertainment center / living room without stringing long cables around the house or converting everything to WiFi.

And was about 1/2 the price of that stupid official adapter.

krom

@OO: Yeah it can, check out Wiibrew.

You don't need a mod chip to do it either, you simply need a copy of Twilight Princess to install the homebrew channel.

Ender15

For people having problems with the 360 not seeing your pc, I found this update from microsoft...

I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

[www.microsoft.com]

djpojack

Another vote for TVersity, the on-the-fly transcoding is great. I take it that Media Center doesn't do this? That's sad.

MattHall

Here's another vote for TwonkyMedia if you're running Linux. It was incredibly simple for me to set up (just unzip a file and run it, I believe), and it streamed all my music without a problem. I've also heard it handles videos equally well, though I haven't tried it out myself.

[www.twonkyvision.de]

BrandonJ

To everybody in here who's 360 cannot see their PC's, I had the same problem. XBox was no help and neither was the router manufacturer.

Eventually I found that it was a stupid little problem. The NIC on my PC had ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) turned on for some reason. The instant I turned it off, everything worked perfectly!

Hope this helps!

Bimmer

Add me to the list of people who's 360 won't see their PC anymore. I am using a Mac with Connect 360. It worked for years, then just stopped working all of a sudden. I have tried it with two different routers and depending on the IP I use, it will either just not see the PC, or it will freeze up the 360 when I try to see the PC. It's really irritating.

Player4

I guess the average gamer PC might be louder than an Xbox 360, certainly mine is, but I have a fine PC here at work sitting on my desktop and I can't even tell when it's on or when it's off based on noise. It's a Dell Optiplex GX620.

Someone said the PS3 can be used as a Media Center Extender. I don't think that's true. Media Center is different than simply streaming files from your PC.

glocksout

@TanyaP: I know it's a lot of pages, but look through here [thegreenbutton.com]

Bimmer

The original XBOX is still the king of media centres, and the guys over at xbmc are still improving it. aninconvenientblog.co.uk

theoeeman

TVersity is my choice.

Krylez

For the linux users in the house, I'd recommend MediaTomb over uShare, for the simple fact that MediaTomb can transcode using VLC or MPlayer, and uShare can't.

HeartBurnKid

btw.. can you DVR with an XBox360? Do XBox 360s come with hard disks? How big are the disks?

sisya

I have a Philips DVP3565 (which walmart is selling for 194 bucks at the moment) and it can play any kind of video - divx, wmv.. whatever. And it can play it off of my flash drive or my external hard drive. And I bought a HDMI cable from buy.com for $0.00 and I enjoy all my DVDs in HDMI quality and sorround sound. Now, my question is -- what can an XBox 360 do that my DVP3565 cannot. Sure, I cannot use it for gaming. I cannot DVR with it.. Anything else? I mean, if the aim is to only be able to play all your gigatonnes of music and video on your Home theater system, isn't the DVP3565 a smarter choice? Or am I missing something?

And while on that, is there some way to make my external hard drive available on the network.. so that I can move files from my laptop to the external hard drive without having to physically yank it off my DVP3565 and connect it to my laptop? Is there someway to connect my external hard drive to the router also?

sisya

Keep in mind that cracking open your Xbox will void its warranty,
True.

and this hack could get you kicked off Xbox Live
False, unless you decide to flash your DVD drive with a hacked firmware while you have the 360 open. Even then, you won't get kicked off live.

Poisonous Taoist

it looked like a normal post when i clicked on it, but it smells like an advertisement in here.

DrkBgrk

My fiancé and I use our 360 as our DVD player as well as a streamer for all our BitTorrent stuff. It's fantastic; as soon as it's finished downloading we throw it in the folder on the computer and it's available through the network on the 360 in the living room. You can do the same with music, too.. so it's a stereo as well.

CelesteM

Anybody know how to add media to the xbox hdd? I've streamed the media and i've hooked up an external usb to the xbox, but im running out of room on both the computer and the external drive. I have 120gb just sitting right there, inside the xbox, dying to be used.

ryanprice

Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a second hand (1st gen) xbox and install the xbox media centre? Or is it impossible to network that?

xenobyte72

I had problems using Windows Media Player to stream video to my Xbox, but had much better results using Winamp Remote. In the end though I went with a USB external HDD that I dump my videos onto every week or so. Take a look at the Western Digital MyBook Pro, for a white-cased drive that won't look out of place sitting alongside your Xbox.

SpaceAgeRobot

A lot of people don't know this, but the original Xbox wireless adaptor works with the Xbox 360. I got mine for $30.

cubensis

This is fantastic! I have a mac at home and I figured I was just out of luck with any attempt of connecting my 360 to my Mac! Thanks for this info!

ninja_warrior

@TanyaP:

I had the same problem. According to the vmcnetflix plugin, IE has to be your default browser. I had firefox2 as my default browser, and it worked ok, but after installing FF3, it didn't. After I fixed that it worked.

DetroitRhino

this really helps. i actually started doin this with my ps3 last night. It's alot cheaper to do with a ps3 than with a 360 though.

josh5413

I can't wait to get home to try this!

seth.trimble

@sisya: If you already have a 360 for gaming anyway, then obviously, the 360 would be the better choice. Up-front price would be $0.00 instead of $194.00.

HeartBurnKid

For those of you saying you have problems pairing, or your 360 won't 'see' your computer, it is most likely a firewall issue on your PC. You should have no problems with the Windows firewall, but a secondary firewall, such as Norton would block you from being able to properly share your media.

digitalklepto

@aphex242:

I completely agree with your statement. I recently purchased a PS3 (MGS4!), so now I have both the 360 and PS3, while both are amazing gaming units, but they also try to push that these consoles can be used as Home Media Hub, however they always seem to be behind on supporting many of the popular media files (codecs). h.264 encodes and mkvs files have quickly become a large part of my media library and it is quite annoying that neither of the systems will play them. Attempting to stream a HD rip through transcode360 is foolish, transcode just wasn't meant to stream such a high quality video.
I have a HTPC right next to my 2 consoles with Media Center on it and I will use that until either Sony or MS decide to really put some effort into full media support on their consoles.

apolloerebus

This functionality isn't unique to the 360. I stream media to my PS3 and old Xbox (XBMC) just fine. I use an SMB share for the Xbox and Twonky for the PS3. I avoid transcoding software since it reduces the quality of the media during the conversion process.

Chances are if you have a console around the house it will work in some capacity as a media center.

squeeky

I have been using TVersity for just under a year and I have to say that it is hands down the easiest way to stream my media to my 360. I have XP and store all my media on a NAS drive connected directly to my router and I never have playback issues even when the format is transcoded.

steve.ledlow

Theres actually a MUCH cheaper way to get your 360 on the network than using another computer. Theres plenty of wireless-G routers out there (linksys to name one brand) that can be loaded with modified firmware. One of the nice options that has been added through such modifications is using the wireless on a router to connect to another wireless router (basically a wireless bridge).

There are a few advantages to this than using a computer. One being power consumption. Instead of either having to turn on a computer every time you want to get your Xbox online or eating the cost of keeping it running, these routers consume a small 8watts an hour (compared to 100+). Another benefit is you can plug up to 4 devices into the router as apposed to one with a computer as a bridge.

The router is fairly cheap (about $60) and loading the firmware takes about 20 minutes of work if you follow the directions. A nice resource is [www.dd-wrt.com]

Dragonpark

Ha ha.. i did this a few days ago. I extended my media center pc to my xbox. The interface and everything is great BUT, there are quite alot of limitations. For example, you can play divx encoded movies on the xbox if they are in the hard drive BUT, you cannot stream divx movies. which was a pain in the neck for me because i always encode my movies to divx. it makes the file smaller.

So, i came across a problem. I researched online and found a software by the name of TVersity. It's very easy to use and quite useful. It basically converts the file on the go so the xbox is able to play the movie. Quite fun!

Good luck!

salmanj1

where is my post?

Se7enwolf1

If you wanted an all around media hub with lots of funtionality thats easy to use, then you picked the wrong system.

The PS3 does all of this and tons more with out all the hacking non-sense and its much easier to use.

And considering it has a built in blu-ray player and is future proof, its the best and obvious choice to go with for a media hub.

All this article is was for a X-box fanboy to boast about the 360. But in the end, he still fails.

Se7enwolf1

I'd recommend TVersity ([www.tversity.com]) for playing awkward media files seamlessly on the 360. You'll need a fairly nippy CPU, but it can transcode on-the-fly unsupported formats such as .mkv , and older divx/xvid files. You can also add .rss feeds to it and stream internet podcasts/youtube videos to your box.

Dandav

the title of this article should have been

"Do More Than Just Game on Your Xbox 360, or all the things the PS3 does out of the box."

ogie

DO NOT get rid of your DVD player in favor of the 360, unless you have it all hooked up to a standard definition TV. The 350's DVD decoder is abysmal ([www.extremetech.com] [gizmodo.com]), you can get better picture quality out of a $30 stand alone DVD player.

mray

Wow, i checked this thread in the morning when it had like 2 replies.

Even on my powerhouse computer, streaming from XP to 360 was still somewhat choppy, and not ideal. skipback and such was long, and rendering sucked. I booted into Vista instead and the problems are completely gone. Ive stream'd from XP to 360 with Orb and have problems, but perfect video, and them stream'd from XP to a PS3 and the video quality was terrible. same clips, same computer, using ORB, and its just amazing to me how much better the 360 handles it. My question though, will there be a way to play my NES emulated games on my 360 anytime soon? Thats all i want.

Another thing, is that on my PC using Vista, i have to add files into Windows Media Player 11, but i dont have to have it running to access it in my 360, it just naturally is all there as long as its in my library at some point in the WMP11, no ORB running, no tversity or anything. What gives?

doc-vile

You can use any universal remote to control the XBOX 360, the code can be found on the net, if not just do the code search (how I did it) until you find it, it takes a while but you get it eventually.

onaclov2000

The easiest way by far to set up your 360 as a media center is to hook it up to an external hard drive with all of your media files on.

@djpojack: Try setting WMP11 to share its library with your 360, its the only thing that works for me.

MadnessPG

Hey I've got one of the network adapters but it says for 802.11 A/B/G. I thought A went out a long time ago. Is there any way to channel that bandwidth through say a N router?

Brad Isaac

@ogie: Isn't netflix streaming only available for 360?

Any of you have this problem when connecting with the 360 to TVersity on Vista? The connection will not go through for me if I directly choose TVersity as the media source. But it works if I first choose WMP11 as media source, then re-choose TVersity. Only have to pull this workaround once per day/session. Strange, huh?

I prefer TVersity as it can play more types than WMP, but the connection issue makes me keep on sharing my WMP library.

kftgr

@ogie:

With the exception of wireless, the 360 does it all out of the box too, and most of it better than the PS3 (IMO), although both systems take a pretty good stab at it. The article is really about configuring your other stuff to interface with the 360.

btw the PS3 doesn't accomodate IR remotes out of the box, nor does it have a VGA output.

rollog60

D'oh. I forgot completely about internet connection sharing, when this could have served the purpose at a local convention nicely.

They had free wifi, but you had to log on with a browser to approve a ToS.

That meant no XBL for our kiosk.

Paradox460

I couldn't get Windows to share and play the files properly. Installed TwonkyMedia in Linux (very easily) and all my videos were there waiting for me on the 360.

jackhynes

Just a few questions for you guys. How well does all of this apply to those with a Projector setup?

I mean, won't the resolution of Netflix movies look like crap on the big screen? Perhaps even any movie being played from the PC?

Also, what would be the best option for those with Projector setups in this instance of streaming video/media center fun? Is incorporating Media Center & Xbox360 worth it for the big screen geeks?

Thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions!!!

PROPHAT

I had been looking for a way to stream my itunes music collection, I dont like Windows media player for music .... mainly because I have iPod. This is great ..... I am also trying Connect360 and Rivet.

amolkolhe

@kftgr

I found I had this problem too on Vista. A fix for me was to restart the TVersity Media Server service through the client (Click Settings on the TVersity GUI Screen, then Restart) after the 360 has been turned on. I can then access TVersity from the 360s dashboard through the Videos link on the Media blade. Hope this helps.

Dandav

Ps3 is the best but i will buy xbox for try

lifetrips