XBOX 360 as a media extender, limitations?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a windows vista ultimate system at home with a digital and analog TV tuner and I’ve been trying to find a solution for using the system as a media repository for the apartment.

My first idea was to simply hook up the HDTV to the video card and use it a second monitor. This is problematic because of two reasons. First this uses up a lot of resources from the PC so I can’t play games while my SO is viewing content on the TV and secondly it’s hard to control media center. If it’s not the top application neither the mouse nor the keyboard are able to control the interface, and if it IS the top application it locks up the mouse on the HDTV and I’m unable to move the mouse pointer to the main PC monitor.

The only thing I can see that will eliminate these problems is a separate media extender. The only one that appears to work well with vista and supports HD is the xbox 360.

I’ve never owned an XBOX however, and haven’t been able to find any recent in depth articles on how well it works with vista’s MCE. Does anyone have this setup at home? If so I have some questions:

  1. What’s the quality of the video stream?
  2. What formats will XBOX play? (I read somewhere that it will only play WMV9 format no mater what codecs you have installed on your PC, if so that would mean I’d have to encode all my media to wmv, which would suck!)
  3. Can you watch live TV through the xbox 360 from a tuner in the PC.
  4. How does treaming media effect the PC, how much CPU/hardrive resources does it require?
  5. Does this setup require anything other than vista, a pc with TV tuners, and the xbox 360? Do I need to buy a separate remote control (or can I use the xbox controller) or other software to make this work?
  6. How happy are you with this setup overall?

Thanks for any comments!

2

I can’t help answer your questions, generally. I have a WinXP Media Center 2005 system, not Vista, and I don’t use an Xbox media extender.

But, I can suggest a message board that will likely be able to provide more eyeballs to your questions from people that have first hand experience. Check out the “Communities” at www.thegreenbutton.com. They have a number of Vista-specific forums created, and lots of folks there use the Xbox.

Based on the little knowledge I have (don’t trust this), I think you are right on number 2, number 3 is yes, and number 4 is very little. Don’t have any insight to the others.

Good Luck.

3

Thanks so much for that link! I found all the info I needed there, including how to stream divx and xvid movies through MCE. My digital home thanks you!