Thursday, October 15, 2009

xbox 360 as windows 7 media center extender

Bought a xbox 360 arcade off ebay (jasper model). I have it connected via xbox vga cable at 1024x768 to a projector. Picture quality is excellent although I notice when streaming a 720p content I noticed pixellation, I wonder if this was due to network cable issue. Will replace this in the future if it recures again.

Connecting to the main media center was a no brainer, all I needed to do is to enter the numbers displayed on my xbox and enter in on the main media center.
Once they are connected, it looks like Windows 7 passes all the media info back to the xbox, which took a minute or two.

Movie playback was good, there was an initial 2-3 seconds buffering when streaming media. Initially there were a few hickups which I am sure is caused by the low quality cable I used between the switch and the xbox 360. Playback of recorded tv and mkv media does not need any connection to xbox live. However when I tried to play an mp4 file, I was prompted to download a 4MB file. Therefore you will need an unbanned xbox 360 for this to work (which is why I got one in the first place)

Therefore, if you have a main media center in your living room, it's a cheap and easy investment to just buy xbox 360 arcade as extenders (which retails for AU300) that works out of the box.
Once the n wireless adapter is out, you can even run one without a cable.


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