Using XBOX 360 for playing Blu Ray on HTPC? (1 Viewer)

[Scott21]

Hello Home Theater Enthusiats.

This is my first time posting in these forums and I hope this question isn't a stupid one.

I'm going to be building a PC with one of the LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD combo drives in it. I'm hoping to be able to use it to play 1080p movies on a HDTV in the living room, but that's not where I want to put my new PC.

Is it possible to use my XBOX 360 in any way to play 1080p movies on my PC in the office? I did do some preliminary searching and reading before posting which at least told me that XBOX 360 doesn't do streaming video from your MCE PCs optical drive. I read that even for SD DVDs, you have to rip them to the Hard drive to do play them through your XBOX 360. Is that what has to happen for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as well? Can this be done with software without breaking copyright encoding?

I'm really trying to avoid buying a stand alone Blu-Ray player, or building a seperate HTPC to put in my living room.

Any recommendations for playing HD movies in 1080p from the PC in my office to the HDTV in my living room?

Thanks!

 

[hodedofome]

Oh that this was easy I'd be doing the same thing

Short answer, you're better off building a separate HTPC for each room if you wanna do Blu-Ray/HD-DVD right now. First off yes, you want to rip the movies to your hard drive using Slysoft AnyDVDHD - $100. Then, to play it back you need something like Arcsoft Total Media Theater or PowerDVD or something like that - another $100. I hear that TMT plays well with Vista Media Center.

If you want to stick a disc in your PC every time you wanna play a movie on your 360, you're better off just getting a standalone player to do that. If you want to rip your Blu-Ray/HD-DVD's then it's best to have a dedicated HTPC for playback, all the "streamers" out there aren't flexible enough to play the new high-def formats.

360 plays standard-def DVD's pretty good though. You need to rip the DVD into one large .vob file using DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink. Then change the name of the file from .vob to .mpg and now the 360 will play the file. If you want to play a normal dvd from the drive on your PC through the 360 it won't do it, but why would you want to? Just stick the dvd in the 360 drive and play it from there.

 

[shirleyyang]

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