Xbox 360 a good choice for a media streamer? (1 Viewer)

Hello everyone,

We have been looking to get a media streamer set up with our HD TV in our living room to stream movies from our computer upstairs, as well as to watch on demand movies from Netflix. My first thought was either the ViewSonic NexTV VMP75 or the Western Digital WD TV Live Plus based on some positive reviews I read. I then was considering the Logitech Revue with Google TV but was disappointed with the reviews it was receiving. I then stumbled upon the article on AfterDawn "Stream Multimedia to Xbox 360 with TVersity".

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/stream_video_xbox_360_tversity.cfm

Since we just bought a Kinect for the TV down there, I thought this might be a viable solution since we would kill 2 birds with one stone. Any ideas on this and whether it is a good idea or not? Thanks for all of your help in advance!

If you have an XBOX Live Gold account you can stream movies directly onto your XBOX without a PC. The XBOX can already stream a lot of different file types from your PC without any additional SW. I even stream AVCHD files from my camcorder to mine. What file types are you wanting to stream?

Thanks for the reply! We do have an XBL Gold account and I mainly would be streaming AVI and MP4 files.

Check out this link:


http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-media-center/get-started/default.aspx


You may already have most of what you need to stream from your PC.


You might also try using this free Java-based UPnP server software on your PC:


http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/ While it was specifically created for the PS3, it works fine with the Xbox 360 and IMO is a little easier to get going than TVersity.


Is this a good idea? YEAH! While the Xbox 360 is not quite as versatile as a WD media box, it doesn't cost you another $100 and will do 85% of the job.

If you have any Windows 7 PC, they act as a great extender for Media Center (as above). And XBOX also reads UPNP and reads media shares from Windows Home Server, etc. But really, if you have any WIn7 PC anywhere in your house, it is great stuff.