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Got xBox 360. Want to watch movies on external hard drive.

post #1 of 7
12/29/10 at 10:16pm
Thread Starter 
Lot of outdated and conflicting info floating around so plz help. Got brand new xBox 360 (says 'Kinect ready' so it's not too old) as a thank you for some above-and-beyond work by a family member. Haven't even taken it out of the box yet. We aren't gamers so ...

Want to use the xBox to watch movies and TV shows we already own on DVD by ripping them to a 1tb or bigger external hard drive.

From what I can gather, here's what it seems I need to do (with questions I still don't know)...
-- Format hard drive in FAT32. (Is there a minimum drive speed I should target? I own PCs, 2 with XP and another with Win 7... Will I have trouble formatting a drive bigger than 1 tb? Must the drive be all in one partition? Point me to a tutorial on doing this?)
-- Rip files to it using Handbrake and save in AVI format. (Is there a better format? I'd like good quality but with some respect for file size. Better free ripping software? If I'm ripping a season of a TV show, best way to catalog episodes to be found in xBox?)
-- Plug and play.

What am I missing? Thanks to anyone who can respond...
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post #2 of 7
12/30/10 at 8:01am
wouldnt it be easier to just plug the external HD into your pc and then stream the shows to your 360 to watch?
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post #3 of 7
12/30/10 at 8:11am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maynard46 View Post
wouldnt it be easier to just plug the external HD into your pc and then stream the shows to your 360 to watch?
This^

I'm not 100% sure, someone else can verify this, but I believe like the flash drives you are going to be limited to only 2 16 GB partitions that it will read.
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post #4 of 7
12/30/10 at 9:24am
Quote:
Originally Posted by akbled View Post
This^

I'm not 100% sure, someone else can verify this, but I believe like the flash drives you are going to be limited to only 2 16 GB partitions that it will read.
I use a 500gb HDD to store all of my music. I have about 280gb of music on it and it reads everything fine. I haven't stored movies as I don't see the sense for me. I use Blu-Ray for all movies and they would just eat up HDD space. If the OP wanted to use the HDD for game storage he would fall under the limits you mention. Doesn't affect anything outside of gaming storage.

As long as you store the file in a format the 360 can read, you should be fine. If you use the search function there should be multiple threads as to which the 360 can handle.
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post #5 of 7
12/30/10 at 9:42am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mbyrnes View Post
I use a 500gb HDD to store all of my music. I have about 280gb of music on it and it reads everything fine. I haven't stored movies as I don't see the sense for me. I use Blu-Ray for all movies and they would just eat up HDD space. If the OP wanted to use the HDD for game storage he would fall under the limits you mention. Doesn't affect anything outside of gaming storage.

As long as you store the file in a format the 360 can read, you should be fine. If you use the search function there should be multiple threads as to which the 360 can handle.
That's good to know. It has to be formatted to FAT32, no?
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post #6 of 7
12/30/10 at 1:58pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by akbled View Post

That's good to know. It has to be formatted to FAT32, no?

or HFS+


HFS+ is the better choice, even if you're not a mac user, as there isnt the 4GiB single file limit of FAT32.



as for ripping from dvd with the most compatibility... i rip straight to vob and change container to mpeg.... they play flawlessly and there is zero conversion time/power needed.... takes up more space than say, divx... but you have zero processing/conversion time, and no issues with video formats, codecs, playback, etc.... you also have a format that is as close to the original source (in quality/compression) as you can get.

if you choose to go with fat32, your ripping program can split vob's automatically at 4gb (you'll want slightly less than 4096mb per file)
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post #7 of 7
1/6/11 at 6:03pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by formulanerd View Post

HFS+ is the better choice, even if you're not a mac user, as there isnt the 4GiB single file limit of FAT32.

as for ripping from dvd with the most compatibility... i rip straight to vob and change container to mpeg.... they play flawlessly and there is zero conversion time/power needed.... takes up more space than say, divx... but you have zero processing/conversion time, and no issues with video formats, codecs, playback, etc.... you also have a format that is as close to the original source (in quality/compression) as you can get.

thx very much for detailed response, definitely going to look into this more closely. amid all the outdated/conflicting info out there i hadn't seen a good argument for hfs+

are you ripping w- handbrake?
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