Xbox 360 as media centre

Cafe Society
1

I’ve noticed that there are some similar threads already about this subject, but they have received few if any replies. Hopefully this one will be different.

Has anyone set up their xbox 360 as a media centre? If so, once you are streaming content from your PC, does it enable you to play all/most video files stored, or only .wmv files back through the 360? I have read that the 360 will read data discs containing video content, but will only play them back if they are in .wmv format.

Can I rip data discs to the xbox’s hard drive?

Anything else I should know about doing this?

2

From the FAQ located here: link

You can’t play a DVD from the MCE PC but you can rip the files to the hard drive and then play them on the XBox. Assuming of course you own the original DVD and didn’t just rent it and rip it otherwise it’s illegal and stuff.

I’ve never used an XBox as a stand alone media center. Only in conjunction with a PC running MCE so if that’s what you’re doing I wasn’t exactly helpfull.

3

I’ve used my360 with Media Player to watch videos on my TV - or rather, WMVs, because that’s all it plays, which is really, really, annoying.

It may be different with media center though.

4

I’ve used my Xbox 360 to watch alot of divx Xvid .avi stuff by using Videora Xbox360 Converter . This just converts the video file to MPEG-2 which can be played. Ive also heard that there is a converter that will do this on the fly as you stream the video to your xbox, which obviously saves you making an MPEG-2 version of all your videos.

5

Thanks for the responses.

Chew Barker, the program I think you are referring to can be found here tversity and I should hopefully have it set up in the next day or so. The only problem is that I am running it wirelessly which may not be ideal for on-the-fly transcoding (or so I’ve read).

I’ll give Videora a go though.

I’ll post back once I have things going.

6

Thanks, but I tried that before, and the Mpeg2s weren’t showing up (again, I’m using Windows Media Player). Only the WMVs would appear.

7

Finally figured it out, with help from a techie friend.

I basically had everything set up correctly, but it wasn’t until my friend advised me to try switching off windows firewall that the 360 recognised tversity.

I strongly recommend tversity.

8

I started a thread on this a while back and got no responses. I installed and tried running TVersity but couldn’t get it to work. I was able to see all the video files on my PC (regardless of format) but when I tried to play them via Xbox360 it gave an error and failed. Not sure what the issue is.

I tried with with my firewall turned off to the same result. It’s probably some codec issue based on the Tversity forums. I didn’t install the ffdshow filter which is probablt what I need.

Most likely just converting files that I want to view is going to be a more efficient use of my time.