Playing media

nedd

Hi All,

I'm thinking of getting a 360 for its media centre but i'm not really clear on what it does. Can you clarify for me? If there is a post that covers this then please point me in the right direction.

Right this is what i'm thinking of doing. I have an external 500gb harddrive that i keep all my avi's on. I have a laptop with wifi. I have eircom broadband with the wireless router.

Currently i have a chipped xbox (old skool) and if i want to watch a divx i have to ftp from my laptop to the xbox. But with the 360 can i get a wifi adapter for the 360 and then stream divx's from my harddrive, through my laptop onto my 360 and watch them on the tv?

also is there any format the 360 doesnt play?

and lastly is it posibile to connect the laptop directly to the 360 without a router and play the divx's from it?

Cheers for the help in advance
Nedd

Fingleberries

Natively the 360 will play WMV, WMA, MP3 and unprotected AAC files.
I think it will play MPEG files also.

DivX files and certain file types will not play directly on the Xbox.

If you use a Media Server tool (like TVersity) you should be able to stream media of all sorts (such as DivX, etc.) from your laptop to the 360 without any problems. It will transcode the files so your 360 will think it's in a format which it recognises.

I currently use this for my music and all the formats (protected or not) appear to work great.

My PC is a bit old and weak (1GHz with 512MB RAM) and can't really handle the live transcoding of Video too well and it can get a bit choppy. If you've a powerful enough machine (1.5GHz+), it hopefully shouldn't be an issue.

mickoneill30

nedd wrote:

Currently i have a chipped xbox (old skool) and if i want to watch a divx i have to ftp from my laptop to the xbox. But with the 360 can i get a wifi adapter for the 360 and then stream divx's from my harddrive, through my laptop onto my 360 and watch them on the tv?

You don't have to FTP using the old Xbox.

1: Setup a share on your laptop pointing to your USB HDD.
2: FTP to your old Xbox and look for a file called sources.xml (it's in the userdata subfolder of the XBMC folder)
3: This file has plenty of instructions and samples in it. Follow the instructions to get it to point to the share on your laptop. Then upload it back to it's original location.
4: Get something like this http://cgi.ebay.ie/2-x-85MBPS-SOLWISE-HOMEPLUG-NETWORK-ADAPTERS-SUPPORT_W0QQitemZ220141542103QQihZ012QQcategoryZ40995QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
It'll work with an old Xbox, a new 360 or a PS3 (or anything else) if you ever want to get one.

It's not that complicated. It doesn't matter if your laptop is low spec as all it's doing is sending the data and it doesn't matter if you're running Linux or Windows on your laptop. Your old Xbox is just connecting to an SMB share. It's about 30 mins worth of work and it'll save you buying a 360 just for streaming. I've a 360 and an old Xbox in the sitting room plugged into one of those homeplugs with a cheap switch and the old Xbox gets all the streaming work. If they ever brought out XBMC for the 360 they'd sell millions.

Edit: How are you FTPing the files now? Do you plug your laptop into the Xbox specially to transfer the files?

nedd

i have a crossover cable that i hook up between the xbox and the laptop. then i ftp whatever files i want to watch over.

mickoneill30

Yeah, that's a pain. The Homeplugs are cool. They work with any device (with an ethernet port) so they won't go obsolete if you ever change your media player and they're faster than wireless (doesn't really matter for just movie streaming though).