XBox 360 as MC extender (non-gamer)

i'll chime in on the parts i know.
the integration to windows 7 media center is amazing. i heard vista media center is pretty close to the windows 7 version.

i use the media center remote that came with the 360 hd-dvd drive. works great. a little sluggish but it's much nicer than using a controller. i don't know what governs responsiveness of media center on the 360 (whether it's my 10/100 network or whether it's the 360) but media center is snappier on the PC. not unusable by any means but noticeable.

if you have a great tuner in your PC (I love my Hauppauge 1600), then Media Center is just awesome. when you load up Media Center on the 360, it's just like looking at the Media Center screen on the PC.

i'm pretty sure you can use a keyboard on the 360 for media center. or at least the textpad. yeah, using the virtual keyboard suxx big time.

now for isos and nonMS media, you have to think of workarounds since MS won't allow them to play as-is.

no webbrowser, no bluray.

2 minutes (or less) of research would have also told you there is no browser or Blu-Ray.

And I don't think there's many webpages with embedded Windows Media Player. Are you thinking of Youtube and Hulu and stuff like that? I use PlayOn (which is basically a media server) for those, but it's $40 (one time purchase)

I usally use a laptop/pc hooked up the display over MCE. So much easier.
I can't comment on spefic parts but I always find MCE to be a pain compared to a computer hooked up to screen., add a blue-tooth solution such as one of logitechs min keyboards.

Some aren't going to like what I say here but..

Firstly, I do not recommend buying a 360 used. Given the earlier xbox's had major reliability issues, your taking a chance.

You can get Xbox arcade now on sale for next to nothing. Here in Canada, 149 at wally mart. They can indeed to the media xtender thing just fine.

Next, the xbox or PS3 will not do ISO's. There are ways around this, just convert or extract the movie from the iso first

I have all 3 consoles, and use a HTPC as well. I really do not like the xbox for any media at all. Now, if your stuck on using Windows media center, then ok, go xbox. But if your wanting to play mp3's, pics and divx/xvid/mkv/vob etc, I prefer the PS3 or of course a PC. PS3 can take bluetooth keyboards/mouse, does have a browser for basic browsing, does have blu ray, and a blu ray remote for it is 20 bucks.What seperates the PS3 from the xbox for me are how it arranges mp3 and media as well as ease of use, the xbox is too limited and restricted to album/artist etc for songs and can be "picky" with almost anything. PS has a better picture viewer, and using tversity is seems to have less issues with a variety of divx/xvid type videos. Download tversity for free. PS3 also has buillt in wireless, although it sucks and has gigabit ethernet, and can copy content straight to it's hard drive from a pc...not to mention an easily upgradeable hard drive as you can use any sata PC laptop hard drive for it. If you go PS3, get the new slim model, quiet, small, etc.

xbmc for Windows, which turns your PC into a great media center, google it, also free, and if you can get a pc connected to a tv, any bluetooth keyboard and mouse will work fine. HDMI to a receiver or TV is easiest. XBMC will do anything, play anything,.. ANYTHING and is free. If you need a remote for this, grab a Playstation 3 blu ray remote at wally mart, then get a bluetooth transmitter, another ten bucks, and google PS3 remote for windows software...ask me later if you need links. Now you got a bluetooth remote that works through walls for less then forty bucks and controls anything in windows via keyboard shortcuts

That being said, I would still recommend Xbox over PS for games. The controller and live alone are worth it yet alone game library.

my two cents.

I'll add this about XBMC. I'm a huge XBMC fan and I have multiple modded Xboxes which all have XBMC. That said, setting up between a 360 and Media Center (Vista/7) is by far the easiest setup. It literally is for dummies like me. You just turn it on and it works. all you have to do is use some generated serial number and plug it in with both the PC and b360 and boom, everything is there. You add video, music, picture folders and it just works. You don't have network discovery problems, file sharing problems, etc. that I had all the time with XBMC.

true, XBMC is much better in that it supports all the codecs so if you're a big fan of pirated MKVs with Vorbis audio or bluray mts, etc, etc, you're out of luck. but i can't record my tv shows like i can with media center.

I like MediaPortal a lot but it has all the rough edges you have to accept with free products. I also can tolerate GB-PVR simply for the great Hauppauge tuner support.

if all you want is a nice player for all your media and you don't need a PVR, then a WDTV is perfectly fine and can be bought for under $100. I have mine hooked up and it plays virtually everything. the picture is beautiful. plus I can stream over the network to the WDTV via the ethernet (but the networking takes work because you need to set up NFS to have the speeds necessary to stream 1080P material).

lol, I still have and use my xbox1 with xbmc on a tv in our bedroom for streaming standard def stuff and music. If it only did hidef well I'd have it forever.

I'm currently experiment with my Xbox 360 and Win 7 MC. I can certainly agree on the slugginess or repsonsiveness of the remote command, especially first time you hit to display guide info. It certainly isn't the lack of power from XBox 360. The animations of MCE are fluid. I sense there are too much background communication going on between Xbox 360 extender and 7MC. Maybe the current XBox 360 MCE Extender is not optimized for Win 7MC yet (never really tried much when I had Vista). MS should really optimize the current extender code in XBox 360 if there is any chance that anyone would be insterest in using XBox 360 as an Extender (pretty much the only extender existed. Others are discountinued). Currently XBox 360 extender feels slower than my cable box although the UI is much nicer.

In case you guys missed, due to the recent lift of CableCARD restrictions, XBox 360s + Win 7MC + Digital Cable tuner with CableCARD support = whole house HD DVR. Finally, we can get rid of those aweful cable co HD DVRs. Other software solution currently don't support this new functionality of Win 7.

If you really need the full web-video/browser experience on a big-screen TV, an extender is not the way to go. The extender simply extends MediacCenter (and its plug-ins) across the network; it does *not* extend the Windows environment.

Your best bet is probably to wait a couple weeks/months and get one of the next-gen ION-based Nettop PCs with Win7.
It'll give you the full MCE experience *and* full windows on the TV.
Failing that, you'll have to pick out what parts of the Windows environment you can do without to see if the 360 environment can get you close enough to be worth the $200.

As someone who has both a PS3 and a 360, I'd recommend a PS3 for streaming. Aside from reasons from the posters above, I've found that when using PS3 media server and Tversity for streaming, both are fine for standard definition content but the 360 tends to freeze every 10 seconds while playing HD material. The PS3 hasn't had that problem, even before I switched to using a gigabit network a few weeks ago. I use a wired network, so I think it's just something about the 360s hardware that makes it hard to handle HD videos.

I have been using the 360 for quite some time to stream hd videos - I have streamed some divx with ac3 5.1 sound and quite a few wmv hd with 5.1 audio without any streaming problems. I am using windows media player to handle the streaming.

It seems more likely that tversity in your environment is the problem.

Whichever system you decide to use for streaming if you are making your own videos for playback be sure to pick a single format that you like for playback and convert all your videos to this format.

The PS3 can play mkv? Everytime I have tried I get an unsupported format error.

I find the oppisite to be true in my setup. Both xbox and Ps3 stream over Wireless G and I get more hiccups and slow response from the Ps3 where as the Xbox360 is pretty solid and easier to navigate.

No problems streaming HD on my 360 either via UPnP/AV or the Media Center client.
The hardware is easily up to the task (else, why would they be streaming 1080p rentals?) so any problems are most likely on the server side, not the 360 clients.

Can anyone give me an theories on what I need to fix, then? I posted a thread a few weeks ago asking for help, and no one ever responded. I'd like to be able to stream on both the PS3 and 360 without issues

download mkv2vob


http://www.videohelp.com/tools/mkv2vob

this is not a "converter" in the traditional sense...as in not waiting for hours to complete type of thing. Without getting techy, this changes the file into something the ps3 reads, a vob, and it takes just a min or two on most machines.


....and as for Windows media center performance, it heavily relies on network speed. If you find it laggy or glitchy....probably network related.

I tried to get this up and running last night, with horrible results. I'm running a Win7 AMD Tri-core machine with 4GB of memory, and trying to use WMC w/ Media Browser not only made the 360 crawl to a halt, but the PC as well. In fact, I tried to reboot the PC and it took nearly 20 minutes to do so. IDK what was going on. I managed to fix the PC errors, but I'm hesitant to try streaming again.

Also, tried the trick of changing a VOB file to a MPG extension, and the 360 still listed 'transcode error.' Does the library have to be updated for it to see the new extension? I hope not, I have over 10k pieces of library files that it wants to catalog. I just want to see if the one movie I renamed will work before I go through and rename them all.