XBOX360 as Media Extender
I have been looking at encoding my DVD collection for quite some time, and finally found the time to do this. Below is a brief description of how I got on! Lots of companies are now selling media extenders, I read lots of reviews and checked the specifications out, what surprised me most was the price to performance ration. I decided that by far the best value to buy a basic XBOX360 core system for £179.99 and get a great games console thrown in for free. I had the added bonus of already having Vista Ultimate on a separate PC, so if you are doing this from scratch the price of a media PC will need to be considered. In any case you will still need some type of server/distribution PC for most types of media extenders. I connected my XBOX360 up to my network, the Vista PC saw it straight away, after around 10 minutes of basic setup on the xbox and PC I could see my content on the XBOX360.
The Vista PC has a TV tuner which has Freeview (UK), recorded TV shows using Vista, and some ripped DVD’s that we own.
On the XBOX360 I can do the following :
Watch and record Live TV very similar to Sky+
Play MP3 files from my network
Play recorded TV shows and ripped DVD’s
Setup a slide show of digital pictures, even along to MP3 music which is great for family parties.
Play XBOX360 games
I also found some useful utilities on the net to help play other types of video, like avi, mpg etc Great program called Transcode360 which encodes different formats on the fly, we are very happy to give them a link for this great application http://www.transcode360.co.uk
Conclusion
For me the XBOX360 was a good choice as a media extender which provides more functionality then most on the market, with the added advantage of being a top games console.
Update
Microsoft recently rolled out a DIVX codec, so now the xbox360 can also play most DIVX eccoded films.
Tags: dixv, xbox 360
This entry was posted
on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Dr Gadget.
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