xbox360 and HD movie streaming

[res0nat0r]

So I am thinking about just buying a 360 to stream movies from my pc to my hd tv over the network. im sure you guys do this. experiences?

i am mainly concerned it can play back x264 (open source version of the h.264 spec) movies.

i am going to be using ushare for linux to stream stuff via upnp

http://ushare.geexbox.org/

[Kamal]

Re: xbox360 and HD movie streaming

There are 2 things to consider.

Firstly, you can have h.264 in various formats. avis, wmvs, etc. and by default, the xbox will stream avi and wmvs across the network. What it WONT play is the most popular container called .mkv.

Secondly, to play mkvs, you will need a transcoder. There are 2 that I know of for Windows that work very well. One is 360Transcoder and the other is TVersity.

I dont know how you would do it in Linux but if you are going to get an xbox360, why would you ever want to connect it to a linux box? A cheaper option would be to get a 200 desktop, stick a $40 hidef card in it and just share your video drives over the network.

[res0nat0r]

Re: xbox360 and HD movie streaming

I was just thinking this could be a cheap way to get a small device by my tv that supports hdmi, plus hd content and also coulld play a few games to boot (even though i hardly play video games anymore).

the 360 wont play .mkv files? that is lame. i thought i t would.

i want to use my linux box to stream content because that is where all of the content is. i boot into windows probably once every 3 months at home.

my linux box is my fileserver, mp3 server, ftp server, webserver, it does everything i want for when im at home and away so i never use windows.

tversity looks cool, i have heard of it, i was hoping this ushare would be the linux equiv of it.

couple of things:

uShare is a UPnP (TM) A/V & DLNA Media Server. It implements the server component that provides UPnP media devices with information on available multimedia files. uShare uses the built-in http server of libupnp to stream the files to clients.

GeeXboX uShare is able to provide access to both images, videos, music or playlists files (see below for a complete file format support list). It does not act as an UPnP Media Adaptor and thus, can't transcode streams to fit the client requirements.

file formats:

• Video files: asf, avi, dv, divx, wmv, mjpg, mjpeg, mpeg, mpg, mpe, mp2p, vob, mp2t, m1v, m2v, m4v, m4p, mp4ps, ts, ogm, mkv, rmvb, mov, qt, hdmov
• Audio files: aac, ac3, aif, aiff, at3p, au, snd, dts, rmi, mp1, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpa, ogg, wav, pcm, lpcm, l16, wma, mka, ra, rm, ram, flac
• Images files: bmp, ico, gif, jpeg, jpg, jpe, pcd, png, pnm, ppm, qti, qtf, qtif, tif, tiff
• Playlist files: pls, m3u, asx
• Subtitle files: dks, idx, mpl, pjs, psb, scr, srt, ssa, stl, sub, tts, vsf, zeg
• Various text files: bup, ifo

This program will stream all of those formats fine, but I guess if the 360 is too lame to read into the mkv container format than this is a waste, since this won't actually transcode anything. I couldnt find much official up to date info thru some quick googling earlier on the official formats supported by the 360 except an old xboxteam official blog post from 2007 which doesnt look like this format is on there.

[Kamal]

Re: xbox360 and HD movie streaming

like I said, it will do divx, xvid, avi, wmv and a few others (even hidef versions of these formats). remind you, 360 is loud as shit. not the ideal for hidef watching cause the fan goes ballistic with cpu load.

[res0nat0r]

Re: xbox360 and HD movie streaming

like I said, it will do divx, xvid, avi, wmv and a few others (even hidef versions of these formats). remind you, 360 is loud as shit. not the ideal for hidef watching cause the fan goes ballistic with cpu load.

bleh. screw that then. this is why i am going opensource all the way then. none of this "we are not supporting that format before its our competition or opensource" bullshit.


trying to run this mediaserver:

http://geexbox.org/en/index.html

on something like this:

http://us.shuttle.com/h7_g4500.aspx

on the shuttle site above it is overpriced as shit

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=MB-SG45H7V&c=pw

i just found the model number on the link above via pricewatch.
i wonder why it is so much cheaper? must be just the mobo and case.