Streaming videos from the PC to Xbox 360: Sweet!
In previous posts I’ve been telling you that I’ve been dumping my DVD’s onto my PC for streaming to my Xbox 360s (I have two).
Right now I think I have around 50 movies dumped at around 1.5gb to 2.5gb each on my new Maxtor 500gb external drive. We’ve watched a few movies over the last few days and they played over my 802.1g wireless network without hiccup. The movies looked as good as the DVD version without the need to find a disc and put it in the player. Very cool.
Converting, as stated before, is lengthy. I’m guessing I’m able to convert probably 6 8 movies a day – I’m going to for quality rather than size (although size is a concern). So HandBrake has been chewing away, non-stop for the last week or two.
The tools I’m using? DVDFab 5 (to rip the movie to my hdd), HandBrake to convert to an MP4 movie and the Zune software to stream to the Xbox 360. I’d use Windows Media Center but the way I have my wireless network setup – Media Center won’t work plus I don’t think MC will stream H.264 MP4 (correct me if I’m wrong).
Some wishes I have:
- The ability to embed DVD cover art. Right now, all that is displayed is a frame from the movie. I’ve read reports that MP3Tag can do this but I’ve been unsuccessful in doing so. It’d be nice if HandBrake handled this or someone turns me onto a good tool that does it.
- Parental Controls or the ability to tag movies as to their rating via the Xbox/Zune. Right now all movies are available to view from the menu. It’s not like I have a ton of inappropriate movies for my kids, but there are some movies I’d rather my kids not watch. Coupling a rating system with the Xbox 360′s parental controls would be nice.
- Much faster encoding. But once it’s done, I guess I won’t have to do it again.
- Sightly better interface for HandBrake. It still has a lot of exposed advanced features that I’d rather not see and have that stuff tucked away under an “Advanced” button/tab or something.
Storage may not be an issue either. Although I think 500gb should be enough to hold my most viewed movies, I managed to score another 500gb drive (for a total of 1 terabyte for those not good with math) free via www.externaldriveoffer.com/. You just sign up for a Discover credit card, get approved and activate it by making a purchase, balance transfer or cash advance and they’ll ship you the drive (6-10 weeks after activation). I’m patient. I can wait. I waited nearly a year for $1000 gift card, I can wait a few weeks for a hard drive.
So far I’m very pleased with the results and the extra flexibility. After the Xbox 360′s fall update I’m strongly considering signing up for Netflix and being able to stream unlimited movies through my Xbox and get DVD’s for about $9/mo.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
You are right, WMC will not stream H.264 content at all. Not even the upcoming update (Fiji) will do this.
It’s a real shame since the 360 is the best Media Center Extender out there. I would very much like to use that interface instead of the boring text list on the blades. Maybe the NXE will pretty that up a bit.
I’ve been longing to store movies on my home server and have WMC stream those server-stored movies to my 360. Sadly, this does not work. Silly me, thinking that all my MS products would actually work well together.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
[...] I just got a notice stating that the free 500gb Western Digital External Hard Drive that I qualified for over at externaldriveoffer.com, has shipped. Their terms stated that it could take 6 – 10 [...]
December 28th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Nice article about the xbox. thanks
May 9th, 2010 at 6:15 am
I own an Xbox and a Playstation and both are really good game consoles. Let’s see what are Microsoft’s future updgrades on its Xbox game console.~’`