Heads up to mac users here! I just started wishing to play my itunes music collection thru my new surround sound system that i bought for my sons xbox 360 in the living room. My son is able to play his music from his ipod thru usb. Then i found and downloaded the beta version of connect 360 from nullriver 2 days ago and has been enjoying my itunes music from my mac in the basement to my xbox in the livingroom. Thanks to these enterprising people, the sound coming from my entertainment system has given new life and meaning to my collection of songs. I even got my wife interested to listen to my music ( even my 2 boys' music) when we are relaxing in the living room. Tomorrow, I'll try my iphoto collection. This xbox 360 suddenly became the digital hub (apple's long awaited version of microsoft media center). Very empowering! I already registerd and paid for the full download ($10). IMHO, it is very much worth it !

There's actually been another program out since December that allows you to do this and I'm very curious as to what it was because this program crashes all the time and it shares your entire iTunes library. All 411 playlists on mine. I want to share only the playlists that I have selected to share. Anyone know the name of that other program? It's also available for Windows.

How do you get the Xbox to recognize the Mac? It searches only for a Windows based PC. Connect 360 says it's connected to the Xbox.

When you run Connect360 or the other program I was talking about, the Xbox 360 sees the Mac as a Windows XP PC.

I didn't realize any of these programs were available yet. I downloaded Connect360 yesterday. It works perfectly. My 360 instantly saw my iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Simply click the "Computer" option and then tell it you have a Media Center PC. Still can't listen to any music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, but I wasn't expecting to be able to anyway (stupid DRM).

Well worth the $10.

Connect360 2.8 is now available. You can now stream wmv files from your Mac to your 360! Cool stuff I just hope they open up the video formats to make things easier in the future (Please Microsoft Please!)

WMV HD streaming to the Xbox 360 works great with Connect360 (http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/connect360). I'm using a Core 2 Duo iMac.

Here are some test trailers. (http://www.drfoster.f2s.com/trailers_hd-dvd.shtml)

I am impressed as well. Now all we need is an easy way to get video into wmv format. There is a tool to do this from the flip4mac people but it's expensive at the moment.

If you have a PC about you can use Windows Media Encoder from Microsoft - it is free and can convert from (in theory) any video format that has a direct show filter.

An inexpensive or older PC is slow but does work - I do most of my conversions on a Athlon XP 2500 system with 512mb memory.

Excellent, that didn't take them long. Props to the software developers.

The 360 Spring update will bring new video formats:

# H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
# Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.

They have been so good at updating Connect360 I expect support for these will come soon after the update.. Good news!

The question is how those H.264 files need to be packaged.