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Streaming media to your Xbox 360

For those wanting to stream media, including videos, music and pictures, to your Xbox 360, from a computer located on your network, this guide is for you. There are a number of options available, in addition to a number of hacks. These options can be broadly divided into two sections, namely streaming from an Windows Media Center PC (which comes standard with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate) or streaming from Windows Media Player (version 11).

Streaming from both types of options pose a number of challenges, including limited support for codecs and difficulty level of implementing these hacks. For example, neither solution natively offers the ability to stream Divx encoded files. Each method is discussed below.

Windows Media Center

If you have a newer computer, chances are it comes with Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate. This will provide you with the ability to stream a number of formats over the network from your Media Center PC. For the best experience, it is recommended that your Xbox 360 and Media Center PC utilise wired connectivity and opposed to a wireless connection. Should this not be possible, the best possible placement for maximum signal strength should be used. I find this guide at TeamXbox quite comprehensive for the intial setup.

Tips

• use the Media Blade on your Xbox 360 to obtain the 8-digit Media Center Setup Key, which you will use later on (write it down!)
• if you are using Windows XP Media Center 2005, make sure you have downloaded all the updates, including Rollup Update 2 for Media Center (Vista should not need updates)
• Turn off the firewall on the Media Center PC to confirm that it is working and afterwards open the necessary ports

Unsupported files

Here is where the hacks come into play. Natively, Media Center only supports a limited number of formats. For full support, Transcode 360 is recommended. There are now both Windows XP Media Center 2005 and Vista versions. Essentially, on your Xbox 360, you would highlight the video you wish to watch and press the Info button on your remote to start enjoying video played back to you via Transcode 360. A full setup guide is here.

Windows Media Player 11

Unfortunately streaming with Media Player 11 to an Xbox 360 is limited to the WMV format, a proprietary format from Microsoft, in addition to some music and picture files. I used this guide.

Tips

• you will need to download Windows Media Player 11 as well as Windows XP Service Pack 2
• again, turn off the firewall on the Media Player 11 computer and once all is working, open the appropriate ports

Unsupported files

In the case where no Media Center PC is available, there is currently one viable solution available, Tversity. In order to get Tversity to work, I made use of this guide.

Tips

• use Defilerpak as a lightwight codec pack
• you’ll need a fairly powerful computer to stream the higher resoltuion videos
• again, Tversity requires certain ports to operate and as such, disable firewall software during testing and open the appropriate ports once completed
• you might need a fair amount of tweaking for Tversity, best place to start with this is the Tversity forums

That brings us to our conclusion of this guide. As you can see, there are a number of options available to give you a start into the world of streaming to your Xbox 360.

Link summary

Transcode 360

Windows Media Player 11

Windows XP Service Pack 2

Defilerpak

Tversity

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