Xbox 360: Media Center Extender

I always thought one of the best features for Windows Media Center was the idea of having a media center extender.  This would let you stream all of your media from your computer to a TV in another room of the house.  Either as a standalone box, through an Xbox (with optional add-on) or through an Xbox 360.  The idea has real promise.

Unfortunately I haven’t really been impressed with media center, The program itself is pretty weak, poor codec support, it is slow, it crashes a lot, and has a lot of annoyances (for instance it is one of the most aggravating applications to run in a dual screen setup) Without a tv tuner, it isn’t worth it, and there are only a few tuners that are compatible with MCE, so it narrows the small list of tuners that have the reliability vs price ratio I look for. So I never really did anything with it.  Obviously I wasn’t big on running out and spending a lot of money on an extender (Ok so the xbox version is only like $30 I think, but I’d still rather buy a game)

I did get an Xbox 360 recently, which has the extender built in.  Plus the allure of an extender is back because of the apartment I’m in.  It isn’t a bad setup, we have iProvo internet (which is amazing) and their digital TV (which isn’t) included in our rent.  The problem is that we have one cable jack, and one ethernet jack, side by side in the living room.  Since it is a rental, it isn’t really my place to tear up the walls and install a bunch of wiring (as much as I would like to).  I thought I might be able to get away with running one wire across the floor, over the door frame, across the hall ceiling and down into the bedroom somehow… but two cables would be to much (even for someone as lacking in aesthetics as me).  So I was debating…Do I run an internet line, and stream video through a computer to the tv, or do I run the cable, and leave out the computer all together  

I was reading an interview on the internet, where someone asked the perplexing question:  what is the point of a “core” xbox360.  I still think it is mostly a sucker punch, because the customer will most likely have to pay more than the difference before they can play a game, but the interviewee (someone from “The Xbox team”) mentioned the media player possibilities.  And I started thinking about it.

 

Assuming everything worked (which it really doesn’t) that would be a perfect solution.  I could connect the xbox to the TV, have a built in DVD/CD player, plus access to all the music movies, pictures and TV programming on my computer in the living room–besides the gaming possibilities.  I could use the xbox interface to do everything!  It might even be worth springing for one of their remotes.  I could even feasibly run it all over a wireless connection (although I probably would get a wireless bridge rather than buying the $100 Xbox wifi adapter) So there would be no unsightly wires.

 

So, just to see how it worked, I set up my Xbox360 as a media center extender.  (Which is a little silly since right now both the xbox and the media center computer are connected to the same TV)  It took me longer than it should have, I got a bad download (the exe wouldn’t run) and I thought it was another glitch in the media center saga, I started reading around to see what if anything other people had done…No one had reported the same “bug” so I cleared my internet cache and downloaded again and it was pretty smooth from there on out.  (So I guess I am also culpable for blaming Microsoft anytime something electronic goes wrong)  The software runs essentially the same on the Xbox as on the computer (aside from “Play DVD” option) and again I was wishing that it worked as well as it ought to.

 

I was impatient and tried to play one of the old bmwfilms that I had formatted to play on my palm, but the media center was still finalizing the setup and I got a message I had been disconnected.  I tried later to play back a full lenth movie that I have stored on the media center HDD, but that was taking too long and I gave up. (I think my daughter was vying for some attention)

 

………………………………………………………………………

 

Its now a day or two later, and I went with the easy stuff first. Pictures come right up, music played without a problem.  I still haven’t set up a tuner so I don’t know how that works but the “My Videos”

 just isn’t going to cut it. Admittedly I have a lot of video files, I think somewhere around 150 or 200 gigs on a 250 gig hard drive, but the MCE extender takes WAY too long to play.  Right now I’ve been trying to play a downloaded episode of 24 (burger king for some reason gave a free download of a few episodes) it should be pretty straigt forward as far as encoding and format goes.   No Go.  I’ve waited longer probably than it would take to haul the VCR into the other room and get it set up on the other TV.   (Technology isn’t really convenient if it isn’t easier, faster, better, or at least two of the three)

 

Kind of a disappointment.  I was hoping that would be an excuse to buy one of the rumored next-gen xbox360 with integrated HDMI and HDDVD support.  But maybe not.

 

(Of course there is still hope… maybe Vista’s media center works)

 

UPDATE:  I have a laptop with MCE as well, so I connected the xbox extender to that machine.  (As a note, it looks like you can only extend one Media Center Computer at a time)  The laptop came with a sample HD video from National Geographic.  It is encoded as a WMV and about 120 MB.  That played fine.  It loaded quick and played well…. even with the laptop running wirelessly (802.11g)  it wouldn’t play any of my other video files, complaining about the codecs.  So that might have been a problem with the desktop–but even so, it should have told me.