Hi,

I've finally bought a second hand 360 off eBay to act as an extender. Whilst I wait for it arrive I'm trying to plan out the best way of implementing it.

I know it will work fine with all Live & Recorded TV, but will have an issue with the My Videos section due to the 360 extender not supporting divx/xvid/h.264. So I'm looking for real comments and experiences on different solutions to this weakness in the 360 extender.

Option 1 would seem to be do nothing and wait. Now that the 3rd party extenders are available and do support these other video formats, I believe MS will update the 360, but when...? I suspect it might be in line with the Fiji release of VMC, but that's just a feeling rather than a hard fact.

Option 2 would be to use UPnP where the 360 will play these formats. How seamless/painful is switching between the extender and UPnP interfaces?

If I do go this way should I (Option 2a) go with Windows Media Connect 2.0 as I still have WMP10 on my MCE machine, or should I go with (Option 2b) an upgrade to WMP11? Any practical differences between the two?

Finally Option 3 would be to use Transcode 360. How straightforward is this to use? How much punishment is it going to give the PC? I don't want performance on the PC to suffer as that will impact on the experience watching the main TV.

Information that could be relevant here: I'm running MCE2005 with all updates, the CPU is an AMD X2 3600, I'm only going to be dealing with standard def content, but it is in a variety of divx/xvid/h.264 formats.

I do have an aversion to randomly installing software on this PC as I like to keep it clean for greatest reliability (this PC is still running IE6 & WMP10 for example), which is why I'm trying to get real experiences to help plan the best approach.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Mark

 

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AMD64X2 3600+ | 3Gb Ram | 1.5Tb HDD | ATI4650 | Hauppauge PVR150 | Virgin Media cable | Pig ugly big black case | Xbox 360 wired extender

Only option for me was to re-encode everything to dvr-ms using video redo. I know you did't list that as on option. I didn't want me
(or the wife) to have to leave media center interface to play videos . I haven't regretted it yet as everything streams flawlessly.

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Custom WHS quad core, 4gb of ram sagetv
Custom 7mc 3ghz,8gb ram 64bit w7mc
Panasonic pdp 50" xbox 360 &sage hd200
Panasonic pdp50 42" xbox 360 & sage hd200
dual hd homeruns 2 qam, 2 ota
2 r5000 modded boxes (sagetv)
Harmony 880 and 890 remote, 16tb

Thanks for the quick reply.

You're right, I didn't include that as an option. Because I didn't think of it. I guess recoding to DVR-MS goes someway to explaining why you're on 3Tb storage and counting!

I should add an Option 4 of recoding everything. Though instead of DVR-MS I'd probably choose WMV to prevent me needing 3Tb. The 360 will natively stream WMV so this would work. I'd need to find a nice batch method of converting all the video though so I can just let the PC churn through a chunk at a time.

 

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AMD64X2 3600+ | 3Gb Ram | 1.5Tb HDD | ATI4650 | Hauppauge PVR150 | Virgin Media cable | Pig ugly big black case | Xbox 360 wired extender

I would suggest WMV or DVR-MS... I've used DVR-MS on a few DVDs (of course the non-copy protected kind) & it works very well for streaming to the 360.  You loose the chapters & menus, but my wife and I actually like that the video behaves exactly as recorded TV (I find the skip/replay features much more useful than the chapters anyway).  I decided to go DVR-MS because I didn't want to do anything that would degrade quality (though this will be different for you because you already have the movies in a different format).

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Just my $0.02.

Yes you are correct that is why I have 3tb of storage I rip just the main movie and do no compression of any kind. I find DVR-MS to be more friendly than WMV on the 360 just my experience. I pretty much dittro Ryan for the reason I do it the wife loves it as it acts just like recorded tv and as another plus I can add the "extras" off the dvd as additional disk in my movies if needed.

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Custom WHS quad core, 4gb of ram sagetv
Custom 7mc 3ghz,8gb ram 64bit w7mc
Panasonic pdp 50" xbox 360 &sage hd200
Panasonic pdp50 42" xbox 360 & sage hd200
dual hd homeruns 2 qam, 2 ota
2 r5000 modded boxes (sagetv)
Harmony 880 and 890 remote, 16tb

Thanks chaps for the replies. I had a few issues setting up my 360, so it's taken me a while to try and figure out what I want to do.

Firstly, interesting that you both chose the option I didn't think of. I will look at compressing to WMV again. I did try when I first got my MCE but with some resounding failure. Maybe I'll have better luck 2nd time.

I've pretty much decided to wait for the moment and see if there is a spring update to the 360, and hope that will allow the extender to play other formats. If that doesn't happen then I'll probably go Transcode360 for the library I already have rather than destroy my CPU converting it all, and do WMV compression going forwards.

 

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AMD64X2 3600+ | 3Gb Ram | 1.5Tb HDD | ATI4650 | Hauppauge PVR150 | Virgin Media cable | Pig ugly big black case | Xbox 360 wired extender

The dashboard isnt as nice to look at as the extender.. but it should work fine for your video's, its easy enough to drop out of media center to the dashboard and then load it back up if you want to watch tv.  Its all about if your willing to deal with it until the update comes around or if you would rather deal with re encoding all your files...

dlawson12:

The dashboard isnt as nice to look at as the extender.. but it should work fine for your video's, its easy enough to drop out of media center to the dashboard and then load it back up if you want to watch tv.  Its all about if you're willing to deal with it until the update comes around or if you would rather deal with re encoding all your files...

Yeah, that's basically it. Neither solution is particularly pleasant.

 

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AMD64X2 3600+ | 3Gb Ram | 1.5Tb HDD | ATI4650 | Hauppauge PVR150 | Virgin Media cable | Pig ugly big black case | Xbox 360 wired extender