Thank you so much for this. I just don't know whether to love you or hate you!
Love because this is a feature that Media Centre absolutely needs. Microsoft & the BBC should have got it sorted from Day 1.
Hate because I'd decided a while back not to upgrade to Vista just yet as there is no new functionality over what I've already got in my nicely working MCE2005. Fiji would be my upgrade reason. However, you have now provided that functionality kick that Vista was missing. Shall I upgrade now, or wait for Fiji as I was planning?? Oh, I don't know...!
Regarding the extenders I believe the reason the performance isn't good it because the video stream is Flash. The extenders use a hybrid remote desktop connection. For general screen display the regular RDP protocol is used. But RDP was never designed for streaming video, so for that the file is transferred over to the extender where it handles the decoding and display. That's why the 360 can't handle divx etc, Microsoft haven't provided the software in the 360 to decode the files. In this instance the extender is attempting to render the Flash video over RDP rather than natively. Unfortunately that's never going to work smoothly.
MCE2005 (Will go with the Win7 public beta when available) | AMD64X2 3600+ | 3Gb Ram | 1.5Tb HDD | Hauppauge PVR150 | nVidia 7300LE silent GPU | Pig ugly big black case | Dead DVD drive | Virgin Media cable | Xbox 360 wired extender