Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Watching Videos on the Xbox 360

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Watching Videos on the Xbox 360

Posted 2005-12-29 03:53 PM in Gaming.

One of the most lamented aspects of the almost-perfect Xbox 360 media experience is the trouble folks have getting videos running on the device. However, from Videora, the same good people involved with PSPVideo9, comes a conversion application.

Videora's Xbox 360 Conversion software takes AVI, DivX, XviD, and QuickTime files and converts them to your choice of WMV, MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 format. We just grabbed a copy from Videora's website to give this a try, so there's more to follow. We're really intrigued by the $30 companion software that allows for "ITvCasting"; it appears that you can use RSS to subscribe to videos in WMV format and have them automatically downloaded to your WMCE PC for streaming on the 360. [HDBeat]

More and more I'm convinced that a PC in the closet will be feeding a device in the living room. It's just a nice bonus that this particular device plays games as well. Some of the solutions are a little Rube Goldberg-ian (like this) but the future is bright.

Tracked by:
"2006: The Exploding PC" (The Furrygoat Experience) [Trackback]
"Watching Videos on the Xbox 360" (ryanstevens.co.uk) [Trackback]

Thursday, December 29, 2005 6:31:50 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

> a PC in the closet will be feeding a device in the living room

Yes, and that device will be a home theater PC, free of the DRM-ed up the wazoo limitations of the consoles!

Jeff Atwood

Friday, December 30, 2005 8:01:24 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Conversion utility! ack!

You really need to check out XBMC on a classic XBox -- media center like functionality has been around for a long long time on chipped XBox's, and IMHO the capabilities of XBMC totally destroy what the XBox360 currently has to offer. There are no special software requirements on the server, and the media player (based on mplayer) has the ability to handle pretty much any format audio/video you can throw at it (including lower res H.264 [the XBox processor chokes on higher res stuff]). Not only that, but it will play media trapped in archives like RAR, ISO, etc -- on the fly. Add the ability to tweak all sorts of video settings for your display, skin XBMC, write/run python scripts, connect to quicktime trailers online, connect to shoutcast streams, easily access SMB shares, slideshow photos, pull up movie info from imdb, online game with xlink kai, use one of thousands of visualizations, etc, etc, etc. essentially make this the killer XBox app IMHO.

And oh yeah, no DRM crap.

Read some more here:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/

Check out the nicest skins here:
http://www.chokemaniac.net/

Ethan J. Brown

Friday, December 30, 2005 2:20:03 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Seems like you could use any "podcast download" client (like Nimiq) to do what that $30 add-on does, so long as the downloadable format is WMV (and a lot of it is).

(Jealously listening in on all the Xbox talk. Don't have one, don't have HD. Still rubbing two sticks together. Fire good!)