Do You Use Your Xbox360 As A Media Center Extender? Options

[sweetbrett]

mythtv + gentoo on my media box, xbmc on my xbox....no need for MS Media Center...EVER

[Maverick0984]

Windows just stinks. I have a intel mac so that I can boot windows(Vista beta2) and I dread everytime I have to boot to windows. I avoid it as much as possible. The xbox1 and 360 are so cool. But let me stream video through OSX darnit! Vista- same old crap, new glass. They'll probably charge for the extender capabilities. I think there will be five different flavors of Vista or so. Who wants a registry, .dll hell, and installations. Homebrew for 360 please so I can stream HD content from .vob, .dv, and .m2v over my network without Weenerdows. AHHHHHHHH! This is my only 360 complaint. Thanks....

If you think a microsoft product will ever work with anything else besides another microsoft product, then keep dreaming...

yes i know about the ipod being able to connect to it slightly different scale.

[Jman232]

If you think a microsoft product will ever work with anything else besides another microsoft product, then keep dreaming...

yes i know about the ipod being able to connect to it slightly different scale.

I know. Maybe third party or something. I can get a program to run in OSX that does pics and music. Just want to stream HD. That's all. The best I have for now, is to run XPeeMCE through paralells or just boot into weenerdows on my intel mac. Crap is crap. M$ rules on xbox. Sucks in operating systems. Have fun in the land of Vista. You should see all the crap they ripped off from Apple. Steve won't release info on most of the new implements in Leopard coming out next year because he knows how it goes. They just want to be like apple because it's cooler, better, easier, blah, blah, blah. Oh yeah, I miss viruses, system crashes and spyware. I wonder if they miss me????

[henmill]

i would probably use it if i had xpmc. till then, xbmc ftw!

edit, just read your post^^^couldn't agree more

This post has been edited by henmill: Oct 4 2006, 04:29 AM

[Samy`D]

I know what you're talking about, but to be honest it has never really bothered me all that much... I normally go on the file name anyway, I find thumbnails on videos to be about as useful as fly screens on a submarine, they normaly only show the first frame anyway (the black before the show starts). Pictures on the other hand I could understand your frustration however I do not get the thumbnail lag issue with pictures, they normally come up pretty well straight away for me. What kind of network are you accessing your XP MCE2005 machine through?

I do go by the filenames, the point is that I can't move the cursor properly until the thumbs load. I still can while they load but its a button tapping excercise. And I'm well aware that it still works etc etc but I think its a pretty shitty product to release - and don't even understand why they realeased it like that when every other program doesnt seem to lag at all. I use a 100Mb ethernet network.

[thejt]

I cant believe someone said that XBMC is "Over Hyped". Its so the opposite; still a very small percentage of Xbox owners know about the best thing to happen to Xbox. So many people see my box and are blown away by the new found capabilities which I sometimes take for granted.

That ended when I got my 360 and realized how useless it truly was as a media machine. Personally I think Microsoft is slightly retarded for not making the 360 at least half way close to being as good as a Xbox with XBMC. No longer do I take my Xbox and XMBC for granted!

Ive been in the IT industry for 15 years and never understood the role of Windows MCE. To me its just another skew to make money from. I am fully aware of the capabilities of MCE and extenders but I will never give in to the pressure to own both. I do my computing on my computer and my media on my media center. Sure they should be able to share content but they need to be able to stand on their own.

I expected Microsoft so slowly push improvements down the pipe that would build upon the media capabilities but so far I have been very dissapointed. Hopefully with the speculative feature set that the PS3 will offer it will cause Microsoft to get off their butts and make the improvements that are so badly needed to make the 360 a serious contender in the media appliance arena. Microsoft came close to owning my living room but they have left a hold... A VERY BIG HOLE. One that could be filled by a PS3 or other non Microsoft device they dont do something about it.

I'm quickly getting tired of false promises and feature shortcomings when the capability of making something truly outstanding is there.

Please microsoft... get a clue! My Xbox 1 thanks you for your failures as it has avoided the dumpster for these reasons!

This post has been edited by thejt: Oct 4 2006, 10:33 PM

[Martinchris23]

However, I do have complaints....

Oh yeah, as far as Transcode 360 goes, sure it will let me playback HD movies from my PC in formats like .ts, etc., BUT you can't FF or Rewind. I heard with the better media remotes you can use a 30-second skip button but, of course, I have the mini limited edition media remote so I don't have that button. Even if I did, a 30-second skip still isn't as good as a real FF/Rew. That's not a big deal though, so I can live with that.

I'm gonna research this VLC 360 the dude above mentioned and maybe that will stream HD .ts (and other format) files but actually allow me to FF/Rew, which again Transcode 360 doesn't do!

Obviously this is a little known fact....

You can play HD movies (.ts format) directly from the 360 MCE without any need of transcoding with excellent results.

Download HDTVPump and install onto your XP MC 2005 PC and associate .ts files with media player. Done.

FTR I still use my Xbox solely as a media player (XBMC), just due to the fact I don't need to switch on an extra PC just to transcode. If MS opened the MCE completely to allow playback of all movies as long as the codecs were installed, it would be a fantastic product.

Either that, or if XBMC can incorporate TV streaming from a nominated PC with TV Card...

[Techmaster]

XPMC fails at many things, and its main strength is for use as a DVR. I tried using XPMC as a DVR a while back, and it was okay, but the MPEG support was non-existant, and you had to install your own MPEG player just to use the DVR function. I have yet to try it with 2005, so I can't comment there, but I'm sure it has improved.

My main bitch with XPMC is its codec support sucks. XVID, DIVX, etc... Not going to happen. So far, the only thing it does for me is play music, which you can do on the 360 without XPMC being installed on your PC.

For movies, on the other hand, XBMC is the king. For example, on my PC, I have every hard drive shared, and mapped into XBMC. I can literally browse all hard drives on my computer, and open any media file, regardless of its location. One hard drive in particular, is where I cache all of my rips, before I burn them to discs. I have a DVD folder, and a VCD folder. Each one has a subfolder for each movie it contains. VCD's are simple, they're .mpg or .avi files typically, and it can play them. It can also play .rm, .wmv, and .mov files. Splendid, I'm sure XPMC can play .wmv but the other two are defintiely out, along with XVID and DIVX. DVD rips, on the other hand, are a totally different story.

I bet not a lot of people know this, but you can literally browse a samba share, navigate to a .ISO file of a DVD, "click" on that ISO file, and XBMC will actually mount that ISO and play the DVD as if you had put the DVD into your xbox. Already knew that? Well, what if that ISO is rar'd or zipped? Click on the RAR/ZIP file, you will then see an ISO, click on that, and it's mounted as well. I found that out fairly recently, that XBMC can actually mount an ISO inside of an archive. Just thought I'd share a neat little trick that I found, which not many people are probably even aware of. And that is why XPMC sucks balls.

This post has been edited by Techmaster: Oct 5 2006, 10:14 PM

[SimonG156]

XBMC for everyhting on the NAS, TiVO for everything from the TV. Lovely. 360 won';t even show pictures if your My Documents/My Pictures folder is on a network drive! Absolute pile of sh**. And on a totally unrelated matter, why not Live/IM integrations. C***s.

[kesava108]

i use transcode360 with a not a so genuine media centre .

i am definitly no expert but i love it cause u can watch movies on the couch. But it was a real bitch to get it going firstly.

[jagermike]

do want to connect it to a media center