Does anyone use 7th generation consoles as media centers

[Wesley Clark]

One of the selling point of 7th generation consoles (Wii, PS3, Xbox 360) is how they can perform multiple media functions aside from just gaming.

I have a 360 and aside from gaming I use it for DVDs (6th generation consoles did this too though), and I use it for netflix. But it isn't very good for netflix and I usually just use the laptop or roku box in another room. Plus paying $50/year for a 360 gold membership when I get netflix for free via Roku or the laptop is a waste.

Do these consoles really offer any multimedia functions that are worth looking into? I've always used my laptop as my multimedia console (videos, music, internet access). I don't see what a 360 would offer.

[even sven]

I like that I can put media on a USB key and play it off of my X-Box.

[Least Original User Name Ever]

Well, there's always playing video games online, although I don't think that's quite what you're looking for.

[FilmGeek]

We use our PS3 for all our netflix streaming and works fantastically, better than the PC we had hooked up to the TV previously. The PS3 streaming is also free, which is even more of a bonus.

We also have networked all of our computers and can play media from them through the TV which has the killer sound system.

We use a wired network hooked up through the electrical system of our house. Works really well, never a glitch in the connection.

[Wesley Clark]

Originally Posted by FilmGeek

We use our PS3 for all our netflix streaming and works fantastically, better than the PC we had hooked up to the TV previously. The PS3 streaming is also free, which is even more of a bonus.

We also have networked all of our computers and can play media from them through the TV which has the killer sound system.

We use a wired network hooked up through the electrical system of our house. Works really well, never a glitch in the connection.

I spent $100 on my Roku box (before the PS3 had streaming) but I can get a used PS3 on craigslist for about $230. In retrospect I would've rather done that for netflix and never gotten the Roku box.

I might just sell it on ebay.

I've got a powerline adapter kit too for the Xbox 360. I like it. However netflix via the xbox has given me a lot of problems.

[Ferret Herder]

My husband and I use our PS3 as our DVD (with Blu-Ray) player, and also stream Netflix films. We think the quality for both is really good.

[Lightnin']

I use my PS3 almost primarily for playing DVDs and Blu-rays. I use my 360 for watching Netflix and Hulu, using PlayOn to stream from my server.

Sadly, I almost never play games on my consoles. I prefer PC gaming.

[UncleRojelio]

We use the 360 for Netflix.

[happ]

I use Tversity on my xbox360, which allows streaming of radio stations, media files from your pc (music, video, pics), and video feeds from things like google, youtube, RSS, etc...

Tversity.com for download.

[control-z]

Yep I have an external WD USB drive hooked to my PS3 and use it to display photos and videos, and play MP3s. Works great, there is a LOT of media right at my fingertips. I do find that the PS3 doesn't play every video format out there, it plays about 75% of them.

[GargoyleWB]

Originally Posted by happ

I use Tversity on my xbox360, which allows streaming of radio stations, media files from your pc (music, video, pics), and video feeds from things like google, youtube, RSS, etc...

Tversity.com for download.

Wow! Thanks for the link, I'm going to try this out. It has been pissing me off to no end that I can't get my 360 to play nice with my home network (Windows XP). Microsoft insists on tons of extra Vista "media center" crap that isn't backwards-compatible with XP.

[diku]

I use my 360 with the Windows 7 streaming and Netflix. Love it. Works seamlessly, except for .mkv files.

[Agent Foxtrot]

I use my 360 for DVD's and to occasionally play music CD's.

[Munch]

I use the PS3 for blurays, DVDs, Netflix, and occassionally stream music through Tversity. I'd stream video, but I don't have any digital videos.

Seriously - where does everyone get enough digital video files to make this a common occurrance (outside of porn)? And what (legit) programs get shows from Hulu? Tversity doesn't, does it?

[Lightnin']

Originally Posted by Munch

I use the PS3 for blurays, DVDs, Netflix, and occassionally stream music through Tversity. I'd stream video, but I don't have any digital videos.

Seriously - where does everyone get enough digital video files to make this a common occurrance (outside of porn)? And what (legit) programs get shows from Hulu? Tversity doesn't, does it?

PlayOn does. The only problem is that you can't fast forward at all.

[Wesley Clark]

Can you remote access a PS3 or 360 from the internet? For example can you leave a disk in the console at home and then access it via a laptop and play the game using a controller connected to the laptop via USB on your lunch break at work?

If not, they should add that, that'd be sweet. Of course you'd be limited to one game which would be a lil drawback. But people can remote access DVRs and home computers, so gaming consoles should be able to do that too.

[kasuo]

Xbox 360 for Netflix and the PS3 for Blu-Ray movies or USB flash drive content.

[pepperlandgirl]

We use the 360 for Netflix, DVDs, and to stream media from our computers. Our 360 got the RROD earlier this year, and for the week or so we were without it, we were really at a loss over how to entertain ourselves. It was awful. Since then we got a blu ray player and that's just as well--it's a bad idea to have one machine do everything.

[Balthisar]

I've not researched this in a while, and I'm lazy and you guys are knowledgeable: Is there a television viewing solution for this generation of devices? I currently still use original Xboxes with XBMC and MythTV plugins*. This doesn't support high-def formats, though, and so I'd like to think about upgrading. We literally never watch "live TV" in the house. Even "live TV" is always via the backend server.

* Of course this involved me modifying my own personal property in order to allow unsigned code, which I'm not sure has been done on current hardware.

[Czarcasm]

Moving thread from IMHO to The Game Room.

[Zoinks]

I burned myself out on Oblivion two weeks ago so nowadays I mostly use my 360 just for watching stuff I stream from my laptop. I'm annoyed it won't play .srt subtitles but I'm sure it'll be added eventually. I tried using my own music as background for games but then I realized that most of my music library isn't appropriate background music.

Sure, it's amusing to kill dark elves while Dial M for Motherfucker plays but I find most songs with words distract me. Plus if it's too catchy it actually takes me out of the game, kind of like when I played Vice City and parked the car just to listen to the music. I've only got one instrumental album, a Spanish guitar one, so I guess I should start looking for more instrumental stuff because that one goes well with long horseback rides in Oblivion.

[Neverending Elbow]

If by "using them as media centres" you mean "playing DVDs on my XBOX since my DVD player broke down", then yes, I do.

Apart from that, no. I mostly use it for games.

[Least Original User Name Ever]

Supposedly, the FCC is taking a serious look at cable cards in cable boxes. What does that mean? Well, cable boxes are the reason you can't just plug your coaxial cable into your video card and watch TV on it (supposedly). With the cable cards coming out, the wire coming from your wall to your cable box, as well as the cable box itself, would be obsolete. This means that you could use your Xbox 360 as a DVR. Also, this changes the medium from a hardware one to a software one that would go through your network. So instead of your cable going through the coaxial cable from the wall, it'd go through the coaxial cable to your modem, then to your router, and to your 360.

[Kinthalis]

I tried that a while back with the xbox 360 but it was no where near as good, or as quite as the home theater PC I built instead. The xbox sounded like a jet ready for takeoff and it doesn't have near the flexibility and upgreadability of my HTPC.

I'm very happy with the HTPC, it holds all my DVD collection, records and time shifts HDTV (I have a digital tuner in it), streams netflix, hulu and a bunch of other stuff, plays blurays, and it's not so picky about the types of files I can play. Divx, xvid, h.264, and even exotic containers (like MKV) will play just fine on it. Windows 7 and windows vista also come with media center, which handles all the TV and Netflix stuff seamlessly.

There's also a lot more options in terms of remote controls for the PC. Something crucial when you're building a nice entertainment center. Finally, my video card is about 10x better at quality video decoding/enhacing/upscaling than any console.

If you already have one though, the xbox 360 has much nicer built in compatibility with windows systems and networks. So that would be my first choice (if you can stomach the noise!).

[Red Skeezix]

I have a couple of MythTV backends that I use inconjunction with my PS3. I'm using the UPnP software MediaTomb. It works well, but it's not really for people not willing to set up on the fly streaming of encoded video. Also MediaTomb shares my mp3s to the PS3. So it's a pretty decent media hub.

Least Original User Name Ever: The cable card thing, even if it makes it through the FCC, won't enable cable tv over ethernet for the sole reason that a cable card is not a tuner. All it does is provide decryption for video and listing data. For a cable card to work it has to be used in direct conjunction with a tuner and video output (tv, video encoding hardware, etc). At this point it seems unlikely that cable modems will be manufactured to include tuning and video encoding.

[control-z]

I'm just happy to learn I have a 7th generation console.

[interface2x]

I use my 360 to play games, occasionally DVD's, stream Netflix, and watch video files from my computer (through my wired network). That comes in handy sometimes.

[Crown Prince of Irony]

I use Netflix on my PS3, and we use it as a DVD/Blu-Ray player. Lately I've been experimenting with a way to stream my DVD rips (in native VOB format) from my Windows Home Server to the PS3. I can do this with my HTPC, but I'd rather consolidate, and have a spare PC, since Netflix and streaming DVDs are the only reason I built the thing, and if I can replace this with the PS3, I have one more spot in my media console for another gadget (maybe get a turntable since I have some old vinyl I haven't played in forever).

I've tried a streaming PS3 Home Server plug-in, PlayOn, TVersity, and a couple others, but for some reason the PS3 always wants the home server to transcode the files, even though the PS3 can read VOBs natively - and since the server is built on a single-core Atom CPU, it chokes when you ask it to do anything but serve up files.

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and re-appropriate the HTPC as the Home Server, and upgrade the processor so it can handle the transcoding.

But I digress - to answer the OP, the PS3 makes a great media center, especially if you are only playing hard copies. It's immensely flexible as a streaming device using the add-on tools available, but as I've found, this depends on the power of the hardware device serving/transcoding the media.

[EastCoastPearl]

Originally Posted by Munch

I use the PS3 for blurays, DVDs, Netflix, and occassionally stream music through Tversity. I'd stream video, but I don't have any digital videos.

Seriously - where does everyone get enough digital video files to make this a common occurrance (outside of porn)? And what (legit) programs get shows from Hulu? Tversity doesn't, does it?

We download the digital videos from Amazon's VOD site and stream them to the Xbox 360 from my PC (via wireless network). Yes, we do pay for the tv shows we download from Amazon, but my rationalization is that we'd be paying a LOT more for cable service to watch the same shows, and there are only a handful of shows on tv right now that we really want to see. I've also used the video rental option from Amazon once or twice to download movies. (Amazon has HD options for many of the shows they offer, too.)

I know it's possible to use Playon to stream videos from my online Amazon library but haven't tried it. It only takes ~15 minutes or so to download a 45-minute show, and I can start the downloads to my home pc from any other pc with an internet connection, which is really slick.

We also use our Xbox 360 along with Playon to access Hulu. You can access Netflix via Playon, too, which we did at first because the Xbox interface for Netflix was annoying - they updated it recently so it's much more user friendly.

Oh, AND we play games on our Xbox 360. Imagine that!

[Troy McClure SF]

The PS3 is (or at least was) accepted as the best Blu-Ray player on the market. It's our sole Blu-Ray and DVD player.

[Crown Prince of Irony]

Wesley Clark, one thought - you mentioned you use your laptop as your multimedia device. Do you have an HDTV? If so, are you hooking your laptop up to the TV, or just viewing the laptop screen?

[Airk]

Xbox360 with PlayOn; Plays dang near every video format I have on my PC (Which is mostly unlicensed anime) and also streams from Hulu, Food Network web site, CNN's website, and a few others. It's not 100% reliable - sometimes Hulu craps out for no good reason - but it's good enough for us techies who don't expect everything to work flawlessly every time. (Ordinary people who expect reliability may be disappointed with PlayOn's Hulu stuff... but then, Oridinary people who expect reliability probably don't care about streaming video from Hulu to their game console)

Also play DVDs on it, but don't really bother with Netflix streaming because I'm not really impressed with their library of streamable stuff. (Netflix problem, has nothing to do with the console etc.)

[Munch]

This is a couple months old, but I wanted to post about this.

I have a PS3, and have been wanting to expand my streaming options. I have Netflix, which is great - but I need more. Someone recommended PlayOn a few months ago, which is also fantastic for things like Hulu - I haven't yet been willing to pop the cash for the software yet, but probably will at some point.

My issue has been that both PlayOn and Tversity haven't been playing back video from my laptop very reliably. Things stutter quite often, making it incredibly frustrating. For the last few weeks, I've been pretty sure it's a hardware issue - and that it's bottlenecking somewhere expensive.

Digging around AVSforum, I found a thread on various streaming programs. Someone very early in the thread said, "there's no reason for anyone to use anything but Playstation Media Server." So I downloaded it.

Nope - still stuttering. Until I started just pressing buttons and trying things out. Instead of going to the folder where your video is and playing it from the list, there's also a weird option called something like "#transcoder#". It just looked like a weird file - but I tried it last night. It brought up a list of the media in that folder, and I played one of my videos.

Totally smooth playback. I watched an entire hour long video clip without a single blip. It's true: There is no reason to use anything but PMS (unless you want Hulu, of course).

[control-z]

Interesting. I've seen that option too but had no idea what it did. I'll try it. I have just been using PMS for photos and music because the video didn't work.

[Rex Goliath]

I have a homebuilt HTPC running Xbox Media Center, which is the greatest program available for a media center if you're unconcerned with live TV. As I don't pay for cable, it's an excellent option. XBMC automatically looks up multiple artist pictures, album art, artist biography, album review (according to your choice of several music rating websites), movie album art, movie review, quality, imdb information, tv show review, box art for every tv season, etc.

And it's open source. I love it.

[Airk]

Care to elaborate on that claim a bit? Their website is terrible, and basically tells me nothing about what the software actually does except for vague claims that they support "almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive"... "archive formats"?

What makes XBMC special?

Also, am I correct in reading that you are not _actually_ using a 7th Generation Console to do your streaming, but have rather built a PC for the purpose?

[TBG]

I still find my original Xbox with XBMC installed kicks the pants off my 360 for media in every area but one. The 360 will play higher resolution videos than the old system. Not that I care about the extra resolution on my SDTV, but I mean, they just won't play (series of still screens) on the old one. 99% of my videos aren't of that high a resolution, so it's not a huge deal.

Actually, the 360 probably plays DVD's better, too, but it's kinda loud for that, and I already have a DVD player anyway.

[Omniscient]

The entire process is awfully clumsy on all fronts.

I've got a 360 and it integrates with Windows Media Center moderately well, but I don't use WMC on my Vista desktop. I don't have a TV tuner card installed and really WMC adds nothing to my set up. Some people with HTPCs probably use and love WMC but frankly those folks probably have very little use for WMC/360 integration.

Xbox 360 integrates with Zune moderately well, but for as amazing as the Zune is with music and podcasts it's pretty average as a video player and library manager. It doesn't handle a ton of formats and it doesn't integrate with the web very well. I doubt many Zune users have ditched Windows Media Player for video use. As such Zune integration with the 360 is only of partial use.

PlayOn and TVersity are ok as transcoders but they both have terrible interfaces that fly in the face of traditional Xbox and Windows design direction. This makes adoption cumbersome and it makes using and configuring them an uphill battle for the average user. The fact that the 360 needs a transcoder at all is a fundamental issue and 3rd party solutions often introduce more problems and complexity that using a game console as a media center is supposed to solve.

All in all the fragmentation of the Windows ecosystem as it applies to media is a serious problem. Zune, Xbox 360, Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player are at once redundant and contradictory. Were Microsoft to get it's house in order at the PC level and roll all these products into one cooperative and complementary suite of features it's make streaming to media consoles much better and more seamless. Plus it might finally destroy the stranglehold the pile of garbage iTunes has on the market.

[Munch]

Okay - looking for some help here.

I wanted to be able to start storing my media on an external harddrive, because it's starting to get bulky. And before I go out and buy a 2T HD, I wanted to try it out first. I have an older 200GB external that I put a folder of video on (it's connected via USB).

I pointed Playstation Media Center to the folder, and updated everything. Nothing.
I pointed TVersity to the folder, and it saw it with no problem.

TVersity sucks at playback, and it's not really an option - but why did it see the folder and not PMS?

[Omniscient]

Originally Posted by Munch

Okay - looking for some help here.

I wanted to be able to start storing my media on an external harddrive, because it's starting to get bulky. And before I go out and buy a 2T HD, I wanted to try it out first. I have an older 200GB external that I put a folder of video on (it's connected via USB).

I pointed Playstation Media Center to the folder, and updated everything. Nothing.
I pointed TVersity to the folder, and it saw it with no problem.

TVersity sucks at playback, and it's not really an option - but why did it see the folder and not PMS?

Did PMC not see the folder at all or did it just not see the media within the folder? My first guess would be that the media in the folder is in a format that the PMC doesn't recognize than therefore it's not showing it in the menu.

[Munch]

Nope, didn't even see the folder which had previously seen on the laptop. I restarted everything as well to do as much resetting as I could.

[Omniscient]

Have you confirmed that the files are compatible with the PMC? Perhaps if there isn't a single compatible file in the folder PMC chooses to not display it at all. I don't use PMC so I can't say precisely, but on my 360 it completely ignores anything that's not in a format it can use and it doesn't preserve original folder structures instead pooling media into a single interface when using WMC. Not sure what it does with USB storage though.

Since you're using TVersity I'd keep investigating the file-type issue. TVersity's entire purpose for being is to transcode media so perhaps you don't have any formats that are native to PS3.

[Munch]

When the folder was in "My Videos" on c: PMS saw the folder (and files). I moved it whole and intact to f: (the external), and it can't see it/them. Weird.