Anyway to copy videos, music to XBOX?

jc84

Hi guys, not a big xbox expert i'm more of a playstation guy but my brother has one and asked me to copy videos, music and stuff onto it for him, I can't seem to be able, I can do this with the ps3 no problem. I looked it up online and everything is saying you can't because of DRM etc, but those articles are from like 2006-2009.

Is there any hack, cable, flash drive etc, that i can get to do this?

Any help would be appreciated

thanks

TheMooseInNam

jc84 wrote: »

Hi guys, not a big xbox expert i'm more of a playstation guy but my brother has one and asked me to copy videos, music and stuff onto it for him, I can't seem to be able, I can do this with the ps3 no problem. I looked it up online and everything is saying you can't because of DRM etc, but those articles are from like 2006-2009.

Is there any hack, cable, flash drive etc, that i can get to do this?

Any help would be appreciated

thanks

No but you can either use an external drive for storage or steam media from a Windows PC using WMC or TVersity.

jc84

TheMooseInNam wrote: »

No but you can either use an external drive for storage or steam media from a Windows PC using WMC or TVersity.

are you serious, no hack at all? streaming not an option but i'll get him to look into an external drive, does it matter which one?

badgerbaiter

You can use an xbox brand usb stick to transfer media to the xbox. Also i think u can move stuff directly frm ur pc to the HDD using a transfer cable
also if u plan to use an external harddrive make sure is in the rite format as i think xbox reads fat32 nly

jc84

badgerbaiter wrote: »

You can use an xbox brand usb stick to transfer media to the xbox. Also i think u can move stuff directly frm ur pc to the HDD using a transfer cable
also if u plan to use an external harddrive make sure is in the rite format as i think xbox reads fat32 nly

so i wouldn't be able to transfer over the network? i thought the transfer cable was only for transferring from one xbox to another

badgerbaiter

Its a HDD to usb lead.. I think there are drivers for it

Bonesy.

so can you put songs etc from your laptop onto your xbox?(getting mine next week)

cython

I think you can rip music from CDs to the xbox's HDD as well. Certainly I've done it in the past, so unless it was removed in a more recent dashboard it should should be doable.

badgerbaiter

Ya u can bt thats painstakingly slow.. External harddrive really is the best option. U can pick up a tb for around 100 nw

evolutionqy7

If ya find a way let me know

That was my first down fall when i found out i couldnt copy paste music into the xbox. My Western Digital Passport didnt work with it either

Works perfect of anything else though, i had my phone plugged into to it. Streaming stuff and using other hard drives. Just not the WD Passport :S

jaykhunter

evolutionqy7 wrote: »

That was my first down fall when i found out i couldnt copy paste music into the xbox. My Western Digital Passport didnt work with it either

Works perfect of anything else though, i had my phone plugged into to it. Streaming stuff and using other hard drives. Just not the WD Passport :S

I bet your WD Passport is formatted to NTSC rather than the necessary PAL. Does it work with your PS3? If it's PAL then hmmm

Ya, you gotta RIP an audio CD like an animal from the dark ages. You can stream via Windows Media Center if you have Vista or 7. But your computer would need to be on, and it only generally plays files that would play on your external hard drive anyway! d'oh.

Anyway, i couldn't recommend more getting a 2TB external hard drive (like €90 in PC World - cheaper elsewhere i bet) and filling that with movies (wmv or mp4 format - convert if u have to) and mp3s and that'll be that.

IMO the large HDD on the Xbox is almost next to useless. Space for more than 2-3 games installed on your HDD at one time is redundant imo. But hey u might download a lot of XBLA games.

evolutionqy7

jaykhunter wrote: »

evolutionqy7 wrote: »

That was my first down fall when i found out i couldnt copy paste music into the xbox. My Western Digital Passport didnt work with it either

Works perfect of anything else though, i had my phone plugged into to it. Streaming stuff and using other hard drives. Just not the WD Passport :S

I bet your WD Passport is formatted to NTSC rather than the necessary PAL. Does it work with your PS3? If it's PAL then hmmm

Ya, you gotta RIP an audio CD like an animal from the dark ages. You can stream via Windows Media Center if you have Vista or 7. But your computer would need to be on, and it only generally plays files that would play on your external hard drive anyway! d'oh.

Anyway, i couldn't recommend more getting a 2TB external hard drive (like €90 in PC World - cheaper elsewhere i bet) and filling that with movies (wmv or mp4 format - convert if u have to) and mp3s and that'll be that.

IMO the large HDD on the Xbox is almost next to useless. Space for more than 2-3 games installed on your HDD at one time is redundant imo. But hey u might download a lot of XBLA games.

I think I tried pal. But didnt work.

My 250 gb hdd on it is nearly full. All of my games and xbox live games are saved on it. I never run it of the disc

cython

jaykhunter wrote: »

I bet your WD Passport is formatted to NTSC rather than the necessary PAL. Does it work with your PS3? If it's PAL then hmmm

Please ignore this entire paragraph, it is utterly meaningless. A hard drive cannot be formatted in "NTSC" or "PAL". These are video display formats, not filesystems! The terms you are searching for here are NTFS and FAT32, the latter of which can be read by the xbox 360. If you plug it into a computer, right click on the drive in My Computer and go to properties, check that it says FAT32 under File System. If not, then it needs to be formatted to that to work with an xbox. Unfortunately the formatting tool in Windows is very fussy about disk sizes with FAT32, so you may need to read this

evolutionqy7 wrote: »

I think I tried pal. But didnt work.

As above, you couldn't possibly have "tried PAL"

evolutionqy7

cython wrote: »

Please ignore this entire paragraph, it is utterly meaningless. A hard drive cannot be formatted in "NTSC" or "PAL". These are video display formats, not filesystems! The terms you are searching for here are NTFS and FAT32, the latter of which can be read by the xbox 360. If you plug it into a computer, right click on the drive in My Computer and go to properties, check that it says FAT32 under File System. If not, then it needs to be formatted to that to work with an xbox. Unfortunately the formatting tool in Windows is very fussy about disk sizes with FAT32, so you may need to read this


As above, you couldn't possibly have "tried PAL"

Sorry mixed them up Not too familiar with different formats. I had a thread start ages ago and we tried a few methods but neither worked. So i gave up

coL

I had this problem a while back when I was figuring out how to play files I downloaded to my laptop through my xbox.

My laptop has Vista Premium and I tried to play the downloaded video files via Windows Media Center. This worked ok but media center does not play all video file types and the interface is very very slow and in the end I just couldn't put with the the slow menu navigation.

I then tried playing the video files through the media player by sharing the folder they were in via the media player options. This allowed me to play the video files from the video library tab in the dashboard menu. This worked great except that every so often the network connection would crash for no reason and I would have to reset everything. I looked into the error reference given and nobody seemed to know what it was or how to resolve it. If I were cnyical I might think that it was a built in error to stop people using media player in this fashion and forcing them to use Media Centre instead. This method will also work for music files (see notes below)

Here is what eventually worked for me. Not an ideal solution but better than nothing.

I bought a 1TB external hard drive which I formatted to the correct size and file type (see note beloe). I connected this via USB to the front USB port of the xbox. Now I can access video (limited file types) and music (mp3 only) from the harddrive and play them on my xbox.

NOTES:

The Xbox will only recognise USBs/Hard Drives up to a maximum of 16GB and in FAT 32 format. I bought a 1TB external hard drive which I then had to partition to 16GB with partitioning software (not as hard as it sounds and the software was free). I tried to put a few different 16GB partitions on the harddrive but the xbox didnt recognise them so now I have just one partition which means I am only using 16GB of a 1TB harddrive which is a bit of a waste.

The FAT 32 file system will only recognise indivdual files up to 4GB so if you have a big file (e.g. movie) thats not displaying/playing that might be why. Likewise if you plan on playing files of this size then this option wont work for you.

I couldn't find any way to transfer what was on the external hard drive to the Xbox's harddrive so I load up the external harddrive with the files I want to watch from my laptop then delete them when I am finished and load on new files. This is a little tedious and means that I have to keep transferring files between the two rather than having a library which I can access/browse on demand.

The Xbox will only play music in MP3 format so wont recognise your itunes music unless it is in this format (there are a few free converters). It sorts to music based on the file metadata so depending on how you converted the files to MP3 you might have a lot of tracks with 'unknown' against them (this happened to me and I had to get a free metadata writing programme to sort it out). I find the music menu on the Xbox and windows in general very difficult to use and a real pain.

If you want to play music/video on your xbox your best options are i) to buy yourself a 16GB memory stick and format it to FAT 32 (cheap option) or ii) a network harddrive which is compatible with the xbox (expensive option).

I am looking into the network harddrive option at the moment and have seen one with a built in torrent client which seems like a good option. In the meantime I will prob buy myself a 16GB usb so that I can actually use the (wasted) space on my external harddrive.

Hope this helps you, if you have any questions/comments feel free to PM me.

badgerbaiter

Xbox wil read a tb.. Im looking at my xbox doing it right nw. And xbox wil also read most formats. More than ps3

coL

@badgerbaiter not that I am doubting you but a little more info about how you got a 1TB external harddrive to work on an Xbox would be nice.

What kind of external harddrive are you using? How is it connected? What file system is it using? Is the Xbox modded? How old is the Xbox? Did the external harddrive work out of the box or did it need to be formatted?

I can only speak from my own experience and a 1TB external harddrive would not work on my Xbox until I partitioned it down to 16GB.

From what I read MS have imposed the 16GB limit so that people cant save games/game info on to cheaper consumer harddrives and instead have to buy genuine MS harddrives to do this.

cython

coL wrote: »

@badgerbaiter not that I am doubting you but a little more info about how you got a 1TB external harddrive to work on an Xbox would be nice.

What kind of external harddrive are you using? How is it connected? What file system is it using? Is the Xbox modded? How old is the Xbox? Did the external harddrive work out of the box or did it need to be formatted?

I can only speak from my own experience and a 1TB external harddrive would not work on my Xbox until I partitioned it down to 16GB.

From what I read MS have imposed the 16GB limit so that people cant save games/game info on to cheaper consumer harddrives and instead have to buy genuine MS harddrives to do this.

I can't speak for badgerbaiter, but I have a 500GB HDD in FAT32 that my unmodded 360 can read media from without issue. The xbox is about 3 years old, and it worked out of the box.

The 16GB size limit only applies when using an external hard drive for the same full read and write functionality as an official Microsoft Xbox 360 hard drive, i.e. DLC, save games, profile storage, etc. If you want to just get read only access to movies/music/media from a USB hard drive, then the only requirement is that it be using FAT32 file system. I'm pretty sure that badgerbaiter was only talking about read only access, as opposed to write access, which you ask about.

badgerbaiter

Its a toshiba 1tb in a 3year old xbox. Its only for my music movies etc though so thats prob why i didnt have to partition it. I had to format it to fat32 first

coL

Ok I think we are all getting a little confused with the terminology here and maybe our wires are crosed a little. What I call a HDD is the xbox hard drive unit that is designed to connect to the top/side of your xbox (not the USB port) and is the main storage location for your xbox info.

An external hard drive on the other hand is exactly that, an external hard drive that connects to your xbox via the USB port and is designed to connect to anything else with a USB port.

@cython I was referring to external hard drives as defined above, which one do you have and how is it connected to the xbox?

@badgerbaiter What way do you have the 1TB hard drive connected to your xbox? Is it an external hard drive or a HDD as defined above? When I tried to connect my external hard drive to my xbox through the USB it wouldn't recognise it even when it was formatted to FAT32. When connected via the USB the xbox only recognised the external hard drive once I had partitioned it down to 16GB.

Is there some way to connect an external hard drive to the HDD port that I dont know about? Using only 16GB of a 1TB drive is a real pain would love if there was a way around the problem.

cython

coL wrote: »

Ok I think we are all getting a little confused with the terminology here and maybe our wires are crosed a little. What I call a HDD is the xbox hard drive unit that is designed to connect to the top/side of your xbox (not the USB port) and is the main storage location for your xbox info.

An external hard drive on the other hand is exactly that, an external hard drive that connects to your xbox via the USB port and is designed to connect to anything else with a USB port.

@cython I was referring to external hard drives as defined above, which one do you have and how is it connected to the xbox?

I have a USB connected external hard drive. I just happen to call any hard drive a HDD in typing on message boards as it is by far shorter, and not inaccurate in the least.

coL wrote: »

@badgerbaiter What way do you have the 1TB hard drive connected to your xbox? Is it an external hard drive or a HDD as defined above? When I tried to connect my external hard drive to my xbox through the USB it wouldn't recognise it even when it was formatted to FAT32. When connected via the USB the xbox only recognised the external hard drive once I had partitioned it down to 16GB.

Judging by his first post saying "External harddrive really is the best option" I'm going to guess that it's a USB external drive.

When you say it only "recognised the external hard drive once I had partitioned it down to 16GB" can you define what you mean by "recognised"? If you were trying to use it for storage, this would be normal. If you go to My Xbox->Video Library->select source any fat32 drive should appear listed there and you should be able to play from it. Can you confirm exactly how you were trying to use the drive please?

coL wrote: »

Is there some way to connect an external hard drive to the HDD port that I dont know about? Using only 16GB of a 1TB drive is a real pain would love if there was a way around the problem.

Not that I'm aware of, but even if there was, unless you have a modded console, your xbox wouldn't work with a TB drive connected there, as the software on stock consoles only recognises specific drives in the capacities as officially retailed by MS, and with a particular firmware as well. For one thing, an external USB drive has a USB-SATA (or USB-IDE in really old ones) bridge, while I think the MS drives just use a modified SATA interface, in which case they literally speak different languages!

coL

What I have is a 1TB external hard drive connected to my Xbox via USB. I use it just to store and play video (avi) files. I dont use it to store or play games or for anything else.

When I got the external hard drive I formatted it to FAT 32 (1TB) and put some video files onto it. I connected it to my Xbox and went to the video library tab in the dashboard menu as you describe (My Xbox->Video Library->select source). The external hard drive did not appear there as a drive/source that could be selected even though it was in FAT 32 format.

I went back and partitioned the drive to 16GB and put the same video files onto it. This time when I connected it via the USB it appeared in the video library tab as a drive/source that could be selected and I was able to play the video files.

From what both of you describe you both seem to have done the same thing as me, I can't figure out what the difference is or why it didnt work when I tried it.

Is there something really obvious I am missing?

badgerbaiter

I did notice before that some devices i plug to the xbox (via usb) didnt show up and some did ie. Mp3s, usb sticks etc. So is it possible that some brands are jus not compatable with the xbox.for me i jus formated my harddrive to fat32, connected via the usb and i could access my tb of media ( not games or game data) like id jus plugged in my ipod. Never did anything else. The xbox i have is the white 60gb model.

mcgovern

Any FAT32 formatted HDD drive should be recognised, my 1TB was recognized but I since switched to NTFS so I now stream it.
Also, for a previous poster, Windows Media Centre will play pretty much everything, if you've got the right codecs. Try installing Shark007 codecs, it plays (and streams) HD content for me.

coL

@badgerbaiter I see where you are coming from and for a while I thought that might be the problem, that or the fact that it is a USB 3 external hard drive.

However neither of these scenarios explain why it was recognised and worked once I had partitioned it down to 16GB though.

What programme did you use to format yours to FAT32?

@mcgovern Did you not find the lag when using Media Centre to be unbearable? I couldnt handle it and just gave up.

Bonesy.

sorry to barge in like this.. :P but just wondering where people got there 1tb hd and how much it cost? cheers..:)

badgerbaiter

Bonesy. wrote: »

sorry to barge in like this.. :P but just wondering where people got there 1tb hd and how much it cost? cheers..:)

Most places have em for 100ish nw. I saw 1.5 for 80 the other day gasp! Ill check where for u 2m

badgerbaiter

@ col. I didnt use any programme.. I jus formatted it on my pc.. My technical knowledge beyond this point is fairly limited.. It jus worked for me and i did nothing special

coL

That's really strange not sure why it worked for you and not me. Will try again and see