360 and Media Centre

steviec · 27-12-2005 4:33am #1

I was wondering, if I were to get Media Centre then I'd be able to play my DivX movies on my 360 right? Or is it limited to WMV stuff with DRM and crap?

And aside from that, is Media Centre a viable replacement for XP or is normal stuff cut down? Eg. can you still install games and anything else on it?

KTRIC · 27-12-2005 8:19am

I read on Skype's website that it is not compatable with it. Thats enough to turn me off buying it.

TCP/IP · 27-12-2005 12:59pm

you need a freely availiable divx to 360 converter i have it if anybody is interested

madrab · 27-12-2005 3:15pm

anybody hooked their xbox up to xp yet?

KTRIC · 27-12-2005 3:23pm

madrab wrote:

anybody hooked their xbox up to xp yet?

Do you mean 360 or Xbox ??

TCP/IP · 27-12-2005 3:32pm

i have my 360 hooked up to xp media centre

PowerHouseDan · 27-12-2005 3:35pm

As do i.

madrab · 27-12-2005 4:06pm

what does it allow you to do?

PowerHouseDan · 27-12-2005 4:07pm

Let you used Media Centre like on your pc...

daveirl · 27-12-2005 5:21pm

This post has been deleted.

vasch_ro · 28-12-2005 2:54am

can you install win xp media centre edition on a regular pc instead of say win xp pro, or does it have to be a media centre pc as well ?

monument · 28-12-2005 3:47am

You can apparently stream music and stills from a non-Media Centre copy of XP.

The 360’s DRM features (such as not been able to copy MP3s etc to the console) might give Sony a nice edge with the PS3 if they follow what they did with the PSP. Sony has the chance to make a media centre of sorts, it's up to them.

Alnilam · 29-12-2005 9:38am

steviec wrote:

I was wondering, if I were to get Media Centre then I'd be able to play my DivX movies on my 360 right? Or is it limited to WMV stuff with DRM and crap?

The 360 unfortunatly won't play divx or xvid from any source to the best of my knowledge but there are already a few apps available to convert almost any file to what the 360 uses, I haven't downloaded one as yet myself but I'll get to it I'm sure... If I can just stop playing

And aside from that, is Media Centre a viable replacement for XP or is normal stuff cut down? Eg. can you still install games and anything else on it?

Windows MCE 2005 is essentially win XP Pro with some extra's primarily the 10 foot interface but there is other extra goodies included, mostly themes to be honest

I read on Skype's website that it is not compatable with it. Thats enough to turn me off buying it.

That's simply not true, the misus runs Skype on our MCE machine in the living room and it's never given any issues at all, I think what skype mean by that is that there isn't a 10foot UI available for Skype, from Skype. There are third party "plugins" that create a 10 foot interface for skype.

steviec · 29-12-2005 7:57pm

Well I've experimented with using Media Centre and the 360 now and it's sort of interesting but not all that great.

You can indeed share movies, but only after converting them to a format the 360 agrees with, and the only converter I could find doubled the size of all my movie files which isn't great.

The other features of Media Centre, the music and photo sharing are absolutely rubbish compared to the 360's own in-built functions for streaming music from any XP machine. The interface is slower, less well organised, and lacks the cool visualisations that the 360 dashboard comes with.

So Media Centre is good for streaming movies, handy for the entire series of Family Guy and American Dad that have long been resigned to my 17 inch monitor, but little else really. You can sign into MSN from your 360 through it aswell, but if you really want to try and chat to people with a joypad good luck!

360 and Media Centre

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