Anyone have experience setting up Windows Media Center on an XBox 360 (wireless network)?

Factual Questions
1

Mods, I wasn’t sure if this belonged here or in Cafe Society. Feel free to move if you think it should be.

Anyways, I’ve got an Xbox 360 and a PC (running Windows 7) on my wireless network. The standard retail XBox 360 wireless adapter on my Wireless N home network. The whole Windows Media Center thing sounded neat, so I decided to try to set it up (my TV is a lot better than my computer monitor).

It doesn’t work.

From the XBox, I can connect to the PC. I can see a list of the particular folders and files that I have shared on the PC. Here’s where the problems begin:

Navigating the menu on the XBox is cripplingly slow. I’m talking tap down on the Xbox controller and it will be like ten, fifteen, twenty seconds until the cursor moves on the TV.

Often when trying to navigate the Xbox will flat out disconnect, citing network connection issues.

What’s strange - on the rare times I’ve been patient (and lucky enough) to open even a large WMV file - playback is fine, provided I don’t try to skip chapters or fast-forward in any way.

If I alter the shared files - the XBox seems not to “see” the changes in the library. It continues to show files that I’ve removed from the library, and can even play them (said files still exist on my PC HD but are not in my WMC library)

Wireless network strength is not the issue. On the same XBox, both Xbox Live! and Netflix streaming are pretty much flawless. So I don’t think it’s a problem of signal or bandwidth.

Running the diagnostics, Microsoft tells me that WMC on an XBox simply isn’t very good wireless. A wired connection should be made. I don’t want to do this, as it would mean running a lot of ugly cable from my office to my living room. Past this, they suggest setting both network interfaces to older interfaces, claiming that Wireless A would be the best, followed by Wireless B, then Wireless G. This doesn’t make sense to me; both PC and XBox (AFAIK) are currently on Wireless N.

Anyone successfully set this up before? Any advice?

2

I’m afraid it’s just not that good over a wireless connection. I’ve tried doing what you’ve done and gave up for the reasons you give. Hook it up via a cable though and it’s fine, but if you’re going to use a cable it’s probably just as easy to hook up your PC to your TV via HDMI and bypass the Xbox all together.

On the other hand streaming music via windows media player sharing to my Xbox from an XP PC has worked just fine.

3

Don’t use it. That’s the only way to fix it. As 1920s Style “Death Ray” says, you can stream media from your computer to your 360. Just make sure you’ve enabled sharing on your machine with the 360 (very easy to do with Win 7). Then in the 360 Menu, go to “My Xbox” and scroll over to select music, video, or picture sharing. You can stream almost any type of file and it does it easily and quickly with no loss in playback quality.

Windows Media Center is the most worthless thing that MS has ever created.

4

Thirded don’t use it over wifi. It’s not too bad over wired and you can also google Transcode360 which will let you play most types of media without worrying about codecs and containers.

I initially had trouble with Transcode360 when I moved from XP to Vista but I believe this has been sorted now, so you should be good for W7 too. It’s a good tool as long as you have some reasonable CPU grunt.