So I went and purchased a new pc with media center thinking that I would have all my movies nicely viewable on my 360. Well I was in for a big surpise. First I cannot stream any of my xvid/avi movies. The netflix plugin (which was another reason why I got WMC) doesnt work so I cant view any of those instant viewable movies. I cannot get the vista pc to see my xp pc so there is no networking functionality. Media center sees the movies on my attached harddrives but the 360 doesn't see any of those movies even after i had the library monitor those folders. All it sees is the lousy files I have on my internal harddrive which I cant even play because they are avi. Prior to this I had 2 xp pcs with 1TB of attached storage with (avi,wmv and hd files) all shared through the network and streamed to the 360 via wmp. I just didn't like the way wmp 11 showed the artwork on the files on the 360 so I thought Media Center would remedy that by showing nice cover art. I shot myself in the foot. I wish I could take the pc back to bestbuy but I threw away all the boxes. I should have done more homework before I bought this pc or I should have just bought the popcorn hour as I originally was going to do. WHAT A BIG MISTAKE!
I feel your pain bro. I'm also dissatisfied with the Media Center on 360. After going through ALL the headache of getting my Avi's converted to WMV files and connecting the PC to the 360. Upon updating the library (took forever) my WMC will start a movie (4GB or larger) but then would freeze. So I never was actually able to watch a movie through it. Waste of time seriously. I've since bypassed the 360 altogether and with an updated video card ran HDMI directly from PC to TV and watch Media Center that way.
The only thing that is stopping me from doing the same is that I want to keep all the files centralized on the pc so that I can play them on mulitple tvs around the house without having to move external usbhd around the house. I've been researching all morning on different forums and I think the avi problem can be resolved by using transcode 360. I am going to try that when I get home tonight. I still need to figure out why the 360 doesn't see any of my attached usb external hds. I've add them through the monitor folders in VMC but they still dont show up on the 360.
Hi Algtz,
Ok so your determined hopefully you'll get somewhere unlike me. But seriously, after reading your post and all that I saw on the other page that folks where streaming video quality DVD's on the 360. Here I'll post the link but I must assume you already checked it out. Maybe one of these will work for you?
Hey why dont u just skip using media center like I do coz its annoying, and just have a shared folder on the network your 360 is on. This way u just go into videos, > change source and then select your computer and u can watch the videos. Funny thing is with this method it plays almost all kinds of vids including divx, but media cnter dosen't.
I used the external usb hdd connected directly to the x-box and I have also streamed my media using wmp11 and both worked well. I just wasnt pleased with the asthetics. But using media center in conjunction with the "my movies" program gives the best looking library on my tv. All my movies show up as one "sexy" library.
Update: After a long weekend of trial and error. I finally got my vista pc to see my other xp pcs so all my files are shared nicely. I still cant get the printer to work. I can now play my avi files using transcode 360. I found out that .vob files renamed to .mpg files keep dvd quality but it doesn't play 5.1 surround. So now I have no choice but to convert my dvds to a high quality 2.0 GbAvi to preserve the 5.1 surround sound. I still didn't get the netflix to work but I'll work on that this next weekend.
