XBOX 360 Extender - it just works
Last night I finally got my XBOX 360. While most people would be dieing to get it connected up and shoot the enemy solders or race around the streets in a Ferrari I wanted to get mine connected as a Media Center Extender.
I got the unit plugged in to my TV (my new Sony TV is still on order), got it on to my LAN and selected Media Center from the dash board. The experience was amazingly simple. My PC prompted me to connect the 360, when I accepted the connection it downloaded the components from XBOX.COM ran the update and then prompted me to enter the code number that was displayed on the XBOX.
Within 10 minutes the XBOX was working as an extender complete with all my recorded TV, music and pictures.
I have never used a V1 Extender so have nothing to compare it with but compared to the “real” Media Center UI there are hardly any differences. You can use the standard Media Center remote and do everything you can do in the Media Center UI on the PC
Watching recorded TV was flawless and put very little strain on the host PC.
The whole out of box experience was very simple and straight forward, it just worked.
They tell me that the XBOX 360 also plays games, amazing ;)
January 29th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Yeah - it works ok over a regular network. However, there are two problems that I’ve found:
1) Over a wireless network it struggles to stream consistently - even music can judder/pause etc….
2) Need I even mention divx/xvid….? I know there is a workaround, but until someone creates a little ap that will do the converting stuff it’s too fiddly to be a practacle solution…..
Cheers
David
January 30th, 2006 at 10:13 pm
Awesome Ian! The 360 rocks as an extender, even for HD. I agree with David that it can be jittery, but I just posted an update on how we’ve doing this over the past 60 days and how well (or not) it’s worked for us: http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/01/27/hdtv-streaming-from-wmce-to-the-360-a-two-month-update/
David, you also might want to try Videora’s free application that converts DivX for the 360: http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/Xbox360/index.html
Cheers!
kct
January 31st, 2006 at 2:39 am
Yeah I am a IT Pro and I got my 360 the other day. I have been using the XBox Extender software for about 6 months now. I love it! I figured that the 360 would have been a breeze to setup, but I was wrong. Because of MS Firewalls like OneCare, ICS, and Windows Firewall I had a bitch of a time getting the setup to go through. Took me about 8 hours of fiddling with it. Finally though I got it and love it. Just wish there was an easy way to take my huge DVD collection and rip it to the hard drive and be able to play them on my Extenders. I use MyMovies Add-In and some other apps to re-encode the DVD’s, but it takes entirely too long and when they are done I lose the surround sound of the movie. Plus I have to turn my reciever way up to hear the audio. Hope that soon there is a work around for this.
March 4th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
I use DVDtoWMV software to rip the movies and it encodes with 5.1 surround sound (DD), need a powerful PC and then it takes about 1 hour per movie.