Playing Movies from an External Hard Drive on the XBOX 360

johnnyDubrovnik

Hi All,

Does anyone know if I can play files mpg, avi, wmv from an external hard drive connected to the XBOX 360?

In the Media Menu under Music, I can play MP3 files from the External hard drive but I cant play the movies. Does anyone know why?

Alternatively, how can I copy the Movies from the external hard drvie to the XBOX hard drive?

Thanks,
John

PixelTrawler

you can stream movies over a network from a media centre edition windows pc,

you can play music from an xp box or harddrive afaik but not movies

calex71

heres a messy way to stream divx / avi movies on ur pc to xbox, (connect external drive to pc)

http://www.mperfect.net/mceDivX360/

you still need to have a media center pc though

surm00

You need a fat32 hd. Then download http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/Xbox360/download.php to convert the files.... then you can watch your movies straight off your hd

neacy69

Im currently using the Zune software and XP SP2 which works great for music, pictures and video encoded with MP4, Zune WMV and WMV.
Does anyone know how I can play divx or xvids thru the xbox as the links above appear to be for MCE

Gran Hermano

I've used http://www.tversity.com/ for over a year to stream
all video and sound files from my laptop to the 360 via my home
wifi network.Supports pretty much all formats as it converts on the
fly so no need to manually convert to wmv for example.

starman100

I am using TVersity as well, which sets up a media server on your PC. The 360 can pick this up and play whatever files are present (music (MP3, etc.), photos (JPG, etc.) or movies (DIVX, XVID). Quality of playback for DIVX isn't as good however compared to direct playback using a VGA cable and a decoder such as VLC Mediaplayer (upscaled to a 42" plasma HD-TV).

neacy69

{Holy thread revival batman!!}

Does anybody exactly which type of HD files will play in the Xbox360. I have my external HDD connected by USB and I wanted to download some HD content to play through the Xbox onto my HD telly?
Whenever I try to download a file they are all x264 files and I dont want to waste time downloading them if they aren't going to play for me?

Nedved85

I have a western digital usb powered 160gb external hdd and it works fine for watching movies on my 360..... just plug and play!

neacy69

Nedved85 wrote: »

I have a western digital usb powered 160gb external hdd and it works fine for watching movies on my 360..... just plug and play!

THanks for that. Thats what I have been doing ....
but my question is what types of HD movie files are supported by the xbox360. Whenever I find a 720p HD file it mentions someting about x264 file format or encoding format.
So I was asking for peoples experiences of playing HD files from the external HDD on the xbox

the corpo

most HD rips are encoded as mkv files, which the xbox can't play. now that the xbox has been updated to play divx's i thought there'd be a trickle of divx rips, but there doesn't seem to be yet

Makaveli

.mkv is just the container, the encodes are h.264. Afaik the 360 doesn't support them.

WellyJ

It plays high definition .wmv and there are tons of nice HD-DVD rips and BLU-RAY rips to .wmv

Obviously these are not legal and here is not the place to discuss obtaining or watching them.

You may want to format your External Drive to HFS because FAT32 wont support files bigger than 4GB and these are all around 9GB.

Riesen_Meal

Will the Xbox read a HFS formatted drive?

I dont know much bout hardrives, is it common in external HDs?

WellyJ

Fieldog wrote: »

Will the Xbox read a HFS formatted drive?

I dont know much bout hardrives, is it common in external HDs?

Yes it will, NTFS is the one it doesnt read.

It is not at all common for them come formatted to HFS,

But you can do that yourself, there is a nice program called Macdrive that will do it, and also it will let Windows recognise the drive so you can read and write to it.

neacy69

WellyJ wrote: »

Yes it will, NTFS is the one it doesnt read.

It is not at all common for them come formatted to HFS,

But you can do that yourself, there is a nice program called Macdrive that will do it, and also it will let Windows recognise the drive so you can read and write to it.

The only problem I have with converting to HFS is that a PC will only recognise the drive if it has the macdrive software installed on it which could cause a problem for me cos I frequently use my HDD on my friends machine to get new files

soundsham

I have a dell m1330 laptop with quite a few movies stored up and xbox can i put movies on usb stick to watch through xbox,or should if I get an external hard drive can i connect it to the xbox, or do they have to be a certain format, or does i require some type of lead
or am i dillusional
very old tv 10 yrs if that matters.....might look at an upgrade

not too techy myself
any help greatly appreciated,
sound.

myvirusbroke

An easy way to watch movies on the xbox 360 from an external harddrive that i found was if the codec you use for the movie is a mp4 codec but converting to avi then just change the .avi to .mp4 for the movie. i tried it with an external hard drive that was formatted from the 360 and it works. and most movies use that. at least that i have downloaded. try it . it works