Last night I managed to get the last piece of my Xbox 360 home entertainment center hooked up and running to my satisfaction. Now I’ve got:
- purchased games on DVD (of course)
- downloaded games from the Xbox Live Arcade (SmashTV is sweet!)
- Downloadable music and video from Xbox Live AND Media Center’s Online Spotlight
- Music streaming from my Media Center PC to my Xbox (and playing through my stereo equipment so it sounds good)
- Photos streaming from my Media Center PC to my Xbox (and playing on the TV screen where everyone can enjoy them)
- Videos streaming from my Media Center PC to my Xbox (and playing on the TV screen where everyone can enjoy them)
The music and the videos were actually the most challenging for me to figure out.
Music – I work at a company that sells movies and music to the general public through retail outlets. As a result, there are tons of CDs floating around the office – promos, free copies from the labels, gifts from the merchandising dept., etc. So I’ve got a huge-eriffic collection of MP3 and WMA audio files on my Media Center PC (and more on my desktop at work – centralizing is turning into a challenge). I really wanted these to all be playable through my home entertainment stereo system, and now that works. However, when I first loaded up the Media Center Extender on the Xbox 360, it didn’t appear as if all of my songs got imported and were playable. In fact, the first time I tried, only 1/5th of my collection showed up. I simply ended up giving the system more time to build it’s indexes up and now every single track shows up. It was several days between attempts at me accessing my music – I’ve mostly just been playing games, but now they’re all there. ** I have not yet tried adding tracks to the PC to see if they’ll be automatically detected by the Media Center Extender on the 360.
Video – I’ve got some rips of DVDs. I’ve got one or two movies I’ve downloaded (possibly stepping across the fine line of legality, but that’s a different discussion). The thing is, I have several files which have been encoded using the highly effective Xvid compressor. I wanted to watch these videos on the Xbox 360, but the 360 only supports 3 or 4 video formats, excluding common formats like AVI, Xvid, Quicktime, DivX, and H264. So the challenge was finding the right method for converting these videos to a format the Xbox understands.
My first attempt at converting videos from Xvid and other formats to WMV and MPG formats understood by the Xbox involved the Videora Xbox 360 Converter. The tool was easy to download and install, but when I converted a long movie file, the audio got intolerably out of synch with the video. Also, the file size of the converted video was more than double the size of the Xvid file. It also took more than two hours to convert a single video file. These two problems combined to make the Videora tool unsuitable for my needs.
My second attempt involved a sweet concept called Transcode360 from Runtime360. For those who don’t know, Runtime360 is responsible for creating the Xbox Media Center (available for hacked classic Xboxes). Basically, Runtime360 built a Media Center application which would transcode (convert) the video files on the fly. That means I got to store them on the Media Center hard drives as an Xvid – good for small file sizes. I got to watch the video on the TV screen through the Xbox Media Center Extender. I lose the ability to fast forward and rewind, but I’m not really that concerned. I can pause and stop the playing video, and that’s what is important. Once I got the settings and processes correct, everything started working beautifully. However, the settings were non-intuitive as far as I was concerned, so I thought I’d document them here. You can’t simply install Transcode360, navigate to a video on your Xbox and click “OK”. You have to follow the steps I outline below. I’d like to thank the fine folks posting to the Xbox Scene forums for helping me understand how to get things working.
To get started, connect your Xbox to your Media Center PC with the Media Center Extender. Then download and install Transcode360 from http://www.runtime360.com. I have my Media Center PC attached to my network via a wireless connection, so I was required to increase the default timeout value from 40 seconds to something larger (I arbitrarily picked 120 seconds) as shown in this screenshot:
The following screenshots come from the Media Center PC itself, but the process is the same on the Xbox. To watch a movie you have saved in an “invalid” format, first fire up your Xbox 360 Media Center Extender:
Next, go through the menus to select the video you want. Hit the INFO button on your Xbox 360 remote to bring up the options dialog for the video and select the MORE option:
Now hit Transcode to begin the process of converting the video on the fly and streaming it to your Xbox 360 and your TV:
That’s all there is to it! You’ll see a little spinny icon then your video will start to play.
This method supposedly lets you play pretty much any video (including quicktime and real media) on your Xbox.
** This post makes no statements about how you should go about getting your videos. Instead it is posted in the spirit of extending the functionality of an already great product to turn it into something I personally wanted (and thanks to Runtime360 and Transcode360, had to do almost no work to get)