Having Media Center On Your Xbox 360 Enabled: Priceless
Never before have I truly thought the Xbox 360 was worth the $400 price tag. I have thought it was well worth it up to now, but now $400 almost seems like a bargain. Yes thats right, I said bargain. For years I have been looking for a solution to be able to play my huge archive of videos stored on my computer on my TV. Anything from AMVs, anime, TV shows, random internet videos, movies, and more. Well as long as they are in the WMV format (thank god almost my entire collection is), then the Xbox 360 has you covered. Quite some time ago I before I got my 360, I tried to setup Media Center Edition on my desktop computer, and without knowing that you are not able to upgrade any version of Windows (Home edition in my case) to a Media Center Edition copy, I completely crashed my Windows. I didn't lose any files, but I can now no longer boot to that drive or re-install any form of windows (even Home) without formatting the hard drive. Luckily I made a backup Windows on my D drive just incase, so now for the past months everything has been running off my slaved D drive. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Last night I realized that the problem was that you need to install Media Center fresh from format, and I thought of my laptop. I never kept anything on it that wasn't on my desktop. I did a quick backup and begun formatting and soon installing Windows XP Media Center Edition. After my terrible laptop kept erroring, such as the CD drive just not responding once it asked for disc 2 and stuff, it took me about 2.5 hours to get the Media Center installed. Then once I got it running, it took about another hour until I got the network setup right and for the 360 to recognize my laptop. I nearly fell asleep using my laptop, so I called it a day and began working again this morning. Finally after getting all the new Media Extender software setup, and my 360 to recognize my laptop, it was ready to fire up the Media Center on t he 360. Now my setup is a Netgear Super G 108MBPS router, wirelessly connected to my laptop with a Super G card, and wired to my 360 and desktop. So there should be no problem playing back any videos, right? Wrong. Even using a 108MBPS wireless connection (which stays about 40MBPS standard), the Media Center was very laggy, even in the menu and playing SDTV videos. So now I have my laptop folded up next to my desktop and connected through wires. Now Media Center runs perfectly smooth, and all my videos, even HD ones, play perfectly. I have it setup so I can control my folders on my laptop with my desktop, so I can add or delete videos anytime I want without opening the laptop, and my 360 can access them anytime. After all the work setting it up, the reward is well worth it. It's never been easier to watch any video off my computer on my TV. This is much easier than trying to deal with video outs on computer and messing through crazy settings. I search my entire laptop hard drive with my 360 and instantly add any folder to the mix. It's perfect. I don't even have the entire Media Center experience, as you can also watch TV, and have the 360 act as a full DVR. I just wish it could play more codecs such as a DivX or XviD, so I'll just have to stick to converting videos still to WMV. If you want to watch videos from your computer on your TV, and you have a 360, get Media Center Edition NOW. Even if you're low on cash, I'm sure there is some way you get a hold of it...... (DON'T LOOK AT ME! ;) ). Going through the setup is well worth it, and really shows why you should have an Xbox 360.
posted by ElChibo at 3:46 PM
7 Comments:
As much as I hate Windows, that kind of integration is kind of cool, even though Front Row (Apple) owns Media Center. It does. I could go on and on for hours about how much better OS X Tiger is better than Windows, but I won't get into that here. Congratulations on getting that set up, Windows can be a bitch like that. But anyways, for my suggestion, you can download Windows Media Encoder (as much as I can't stand windows its pretty good at what it does) from windows.com to farily easily encode videos to wmv format. Good luck with that.
yea you got it, windows media encoder is exactly what I use. I've never used front row, but ever since I saw it at that press conference back in september or something, Iv always wanted to use it, although now experiencing Media Center, I think windows might have it there. I'm a fan of apple products, I've just never owned a mac before lol, but iPods own the world of MP3 players. I just hate mac video codecs. the MP4 H.264 is nice, but I still like WMV codec the best out of all of them, and I've been using it for years now so most of my collection is already that format. Before WMV7 came out though, it was absolutely terrible.
Well I don't think I would get an X360 just cause it had Media Center. Might be great for me but too me it means nothing.
But still a cool feature for that small percentile that will use it.
Hey Elchibo!
I'm the guy who sent you guys 500 questions :p.
Anyway I had sent a friends request to you, I hope you accept!
Azentium
yup i got the request and message, then replied and accepted. feel free to leave another 500 questions, just would u mind putting ur name as Azentium or something else instead of anonymouse so i can recognize u?
You can't touch H.264
You can use WMV if you want, but don't go ahead and make rash points that it's better than H.264. There is nothing even close. I have seen HD content in H.264 (it was the X3 movie trailer, but still, it was 1080p) and the 480p version looked almost as good. You can stretch a video with the resolution of a cell phone and stretch it to your entire monitor and the loss in quality is so little you'll hardly notice.
You can encode into it with windows as well if you have QuickTime 7, qhich I'll assume you do seeing as how it's free.
Dont get me wrong I have nothing against H264, its just that I prefer WMV. WMV has larger compatibility, which is a huge plus. To encode H264 well with Windows you can use Quicktime Pro, which is not free, although I got NOT *wink wink* for free. The main problem is that it takes so long to convert, and its not my computer, many people have this problem. It can take about an hour to encode a 7-10 minute clip. Although I use a program I found called PSP Video 9, which even though designed to make vids for PSP, it makes great custom H264s perfect for video iPods. It converts fast, and has great quality. Resolution won't differ between any formats. A 480i shot from a high qual WMV will look the same as a 480i high qual shot in a 264, and both would scale the same as by your video acceleration hardware. The same goes for higher resolutions. The one thing that is great about H264 is that it can contain very high quality at low bitrates. When I make a 768kbps 240i H.264 for my iPod, as long as its on a small screen, it looks as good as a DVD, even better, as long as its not upscaling the video resolution. WMV on the other hand to contain higher quality needs a high bitrate, although a bitrate still much lower than that of a standard MPEG, or any other AVI besides XviD I would say. DivX is alright, but XviD is the choice of codec for AVI.
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