OT: XBOX 360 Rocks for .ts playback!!! - Page 4

I have a friend who is streaming everything ot his LCD TV from MCE to his xbox. It seems to work really well, but he is also using some free app to convert all the different video types on the fly. It looked pretty seemless though, and the quality was very good. With any luck they will release the HD-DVD add on at a decent price, then it will be a useful piece of equipment all round.

I definitely have to check this out. I might just have to turn my PC into a HTPC and dump all the useless crap Comcast makes me get.

there shouldn't be any reason why a laptop could not be used instead of a box pc should there?

A laptop (with a few 500 gig external hard drives networked to a 360 and then run thru a vp30) would be a cool interface I think.

it just needs to be media center 2005 as OS. so a laptop is fine (with fast enough cpu to do the transcode on the fly)

what cpu would be min. and what would be suggested-preferable?

2.5ghz and higher should do. but for smooth playback try to get 2gb ram

yeah, i'd say even a little higher than that, maybe 2.8 or higher. my 2.6 ghz machine is iffy on a 1080i ts file with dolby 5.1 sound just playing it back, not transcoding + sending.

I beg to differ.
I'm using a 1.6 GHz PC to stream 1080i .ts files to my Xbox 360 and it works just fine. With 1 gig of ram I had perfect playback. However I upgraded to 2 gigs because I couldn't really fast-forward or rewind very well. Now it's working fairly reliably.

Playback, however, has always been smooth. Getting the darn thing to connect was the tricky part.

-Mark

hmm I thought that even with .ts files more of the decoding was being done on the pc side than the xbox 360 side. I don't really know for sure, since I haven't used that mechanism to playback videos (i've got a 3.4ghz machine with a good video card in the movie room, and I use that to playback .ts files)

One update, seems you don;t need MCE to stream to the XBOX anymore, just XP with SP2

sounds like I should return the NVidia 7800 I got for the Sempron 2.2 and just spend a couple hunded more for the XBox?

1.25 gigs and the NVidia are producing smooth .ts playback now, but the xbox looks really good in the stores and I got to wonder if it wouldn't be an improvement in video quality.

YONEXSP, could you perhaps provide a link that supports this claim? I just did a quick check in the Xbox forums and I didn't see anything that said MCE is no longer required. This would be very big news if it were true.
Even bigger news (for me) would be an OSX app that would allow video streaming to the Xbox 360. It'll happen eventually...

Ed, I can't comment on the quality of the Xbox vs. a good HTPC, but Clarence and Cliff have both claimed that the Xbox offers both better picture and performance. That's good enough for me... or at least it SHOULD be.
Just for fun I tried to hook up my PC to my G70. The HD looks so good on my 21" CRT monitor that I just wanted to see what it looks like on the PJ. I've never been into the whole HTPC thing so this proved challenging for me. I didn't really have the patience for it that day. Maybe another time

I recommend the 360. It's good fun.

-Mark

I dunno, but it looks to me like the 360 does all the hard work, I saw it running off an MCE box at 1.5GHz and a really crap 440MX card. The image output from the 360 looked stunning.

I can't find any official or unofficial mention of being able to use XP for anything 'cept audio and photos. MS has said that XP support may be happening in the future, but haven't committed to it.

As a DVD player, it looked good to me, but it only does straight progressive not scaling, which is nuts as the 360 has the juice to do scaling with one hand behind its back.

Are you sure? And this is for the 360? Not the old Xbox?

I've been waiting for this as I don't want to add another PC just for WMCE.

...

How do you mean "better" Cliff? And compared to what on the PC?

More detail?

Smoother motion?

Because on the PC you CANNOT just set the video card to 72hz, install Theatertek and watch. With this setup you will find that many film based TS files are jerky, as they are badly flagged/encoded at 29.97fps material. This is not TS file playback as good as a PC can do..and don't start me on watching film at 60hz...yuck...

To really get smooth playback, you need to use ZoomPlayer with the Unofficial Dscaler 1080i version with 3:2 pulldown detection. This will "see through" the 29.97fps encode and get the 23.976fps base rate out.
Then you set the refresh rate to 71.928hz using the reclock reported refresh rate - not the display drivers/powerstrip rate (this works best for me anyway).

Mmm....smooth motion. At 1080i 71.928hz it just looks fantastic.

The Dscaler decoder looks better than TT IMO as well.

Mark

Woah, sounds complex.
That dscaler pulldown sounds great though.
I'm gonna borrow the 360 and have a play and see how smooth the playback is. My Worry is the refresh rate, I'm pretty sure it will be either 60 or 50Hz, and I can't watch NTSC stuff at 60Hz, the juddering for films is just yuk. Maybe if you watched it since birth you don't notice it, but I hate it.
The 25fps speedup doesn't worry me as much, but I was vainly hoping that HD-DVD would be a native multiple of 24fps. If the whole world would have just settled on 72Hz for hidef then we could all have been happy.

Is it possible to stream videos to the 360 from an external HD connected to a media edition pc? I have a 400gb firewire drive that I would like to use for storage, as my laptop only has 100gb. ...and well my dvr has more than that

The only files I can get to show up in media center are the ones in 'my videos' Is there a way around this?


Thanks.

You need to setup MCE to be able to see your external HD, then when you use the X360, it will also be able to see it. Exactly how I've got mine setup now. 4 External 500GB hard drives RAID 0 connected via USB to laptop with MCE05 streaming .ts to X360, then outputting 1080i (and soon to be deinterlaced by VP50)

Being a little more specific, inside your "My Videos" folder, you need to create a shortcut to the external drive

Being a little more specific, see post #67 above...
"Anyways, I did http://www.xbox.com/pcsetup then called Cliff to figure out how to share .ts files from the PC:
install hdtvpump from http://www.dvbportal.de/projects/hdtvpump/
then click My Videos... blue X on the xbox controller... Add Videos... Add folders."

Another tip that's really cool, my USB2 ports always assign the same drive letter, even if different external drives are connected. So I've shared F: G: H: and I: and I can connect any of dozens of external drives to those 4 USB ports and never have to mess with changing settings.

Hmm i never noticed that, I just always had the "movies" folder on my machine with the 1tb of drives shortcutted that way on the MCE machine. Handy Clarence!

Has anyone worked out how to reasonably stream xvid or other AVI content without transcoding? my MCE is a 2.8ghz with either 256mb or 512mb, I can't recall offhand, but I think it would kind of suck for transcoding on the fly.

The 'transcoding' that is happenning is minimal. It is really only putting it in a wrapper. Even a 1.8GHz machine works just fine, so don't worry about it. Worst case get another 512MB of ram for $40.

I'm hoping the 1080P update for the xbox360 with VGA cable will work well with .ts files as well. They have already said it will do 1080P with the HD-DVD add on.

At least the 360 was designed to be upgradeable!

I didn't even realise that was the case.
I'm really hoping that as part of the '1080P' thing MS will allow the xbox360 to be set to a refresh rate to match the source for judder free playback.

could anybody of you test via WMP11 if the .ts works? im on winxp pro, but on old ass router. so i can't test out the possibility of playing .ts files yet.....