What do I need to set up 360 extender?

In addition to that link here is a very rough outline of what happens.

Setup Xbox 360 & connect it to your network.

Go to the PC setup webpage in the link above and download file & run, it will install Xbox 360 extender software for MCE.

The extender software will require an initial password setup thing & once out of the way it should connect to your MCE PC.

The Xbox 360 gamepad can access MCE from the blue media tab in the Xbox 360 dashboard by clicking on the green MCE button.

You can also use the Xbox 360 remote which has the green button on it and pressing that will power on the console and load the MCE extender automatically. The official MCE remote will also do this & you can disable the MCE remote in the Xbox 360 dashboard to avoid conflicts if you already have a HTPC so the Xbox 360 will only respond to the Xbox remote.

The extender only supports the formats MCE natively supports in terms of video so that is WMV, DVR-MS, MPEG 1 & MPEG 2. in order to avoid re-encoding material you can use a transcoder like Runtime 360 which re-encodes the video on the fly.

Wavey wrote:

Many thanks for the replies lads.

Got it all up and going lastnight. Much easier than i thought.

My b/g router seems to be working ok for streaming recorded/live tv. Have any of you invested in an a/b/g router as recommended by ms? If so where did you get it.

8t8, I will give runtime360 a bash today as nearly all of my videos are divx.

I also have some dvds ripped to the hd on my htpc. Is there any way to get the 360 to stream this?


Thanks again for your help.

Wavey.

Any decent A/B/G class router should do, A is handy because it wont conflict with any other wireless devices & G is currently the fastest. If after speed the Netgear Rangemax is considered one of the best G class routers (it only does B/G), you will also see draft N routers these are even faster but the N spec is still not set in stone and there is no N adapter for the Xbox 360.

DVD's can be played but they must be ripped in a specific manner;
main movie only
AC3 5.1 audio only
All in one file no split parts

Rename the .vob to .mpeg and you will then be able to play the movie through the Xbox 360 extender.

This can be done entirely within DVD Decrypter which is no longer supported so you will need something like AnyDVD to use it on the latest titles.

In DVD Decrypter go into tools->settings now go to "IFO Mode" look under Options - File Splitting & select none from the drop down box.

Click okay, now click mode->IFO & it will auto select the main movie from the disc, now click the "stream processing tab" and tick the box to enable stream processing now untick all audio expect the 6 channel AC3.

Now you are ready to rip it to the HD once done you will be left with a single VOB file rename it to movie.mpeg & place in a video folder on the MCE PC & it will play on the Xbox 360 through the extender.

That's all there is to it but of course there are a few caveats;
* You can only have the main movie.
* Some have said it crashes mid movie not seen this happen myself.
* You must re-rip the DVD to your HD.
* Not sure what happens if the movie doesn't have AC3 5.1 6ch audio like it has only 2ch instead but I don't think it works if that's the case.

There is one other alternative but I have not tried it out myself which is to convert the main movie into DVR-MS which is the MCE video format, because DVR-MS is MPEG-2 the same as DVD there is no quality loss but the file size remains the same of course & the Xbox 360 will always play DVR-MS files.

Like I said I have not tested this out myself so I do not know if it is a quick thing to do but the friendliest way is to use VideoReDo I heard which is a commercial application.

Wavey wrote:

Thanks again for your reply 8t8.

Is there any point buying an a/b/g router if I'm not going to be using any of my b/g devices at the same time as streaming from the media pc?

No not much point then though a g router might be better in the long run.

Wavey wrote:

Also, I got the xbox to stream dvd's that i have sitting on my media pc hard drive but the video quality at the 360 is nowhere near dvd quality.

Hmm not sure exactly what you mean the DVD is in original form there is no conversion taking place. Perhaps at a guess you are noticing that the Xbox 360 is not great picture quality wise when it comes to DVD's which is a probably one of it's weak points.

Still it should be comparable to a normal DVD player but it pails next to NVIDIA Purevido or ATI AVIVO software players on a PC as they do all sorts of stuff to enhance the image quality (if that's what you are basing your image quality assertions on).

Just in case disable RunTime 360 on the off chance it is re-encoding the mpeg video into WMV which would drop the quality.

Wavey wrote:

Is this because the 360/media pc is reducing the quality to allow stutter-free streaming through my "slow" network?

No when the network isn't up to the job it will cause the video to stutter or drop frames it does not dynamically alter the video quality as that would require a real time transcoder.