Eight months ago the unthinkable happened to someone with such a long streak of bad luck as me. I won something. It was a contest put on by my favorite drink company, Pepsico, specifically the Mountain Dew division. I initially wanted to enter points just to get a sweatshirt and beanie, but when I entered one of the drawings (every10minutes) my name appeared on the winners list. PD, Anaheim, CA.
What I won was a XBOX360 before they would be sold to the public. I ended up getting the XBOX 360 the day before launch, but had already made preparations weeks before to sell it. I did sell it, for nearly 900 dollars. With the money, I upgraded my computer and bought my Dell 2005FPW lcd.
Things were going great until a month ago I decided to give Windows Media Center Edition 2005 a try. It was great, my computer became some kind of media headquarters. I was watching, pausing, recording TV. The only thing missing was... well, the TV. So I did a little reading on The Green Button and found out that I could add media extenders that would basically extend your media center to a television (duh).
It turns out the XBOX 360 can act as a media extender and when I tried to play GRAW on my computer with mediocre results (if 10fps can be considered mediocre), I convinced myself it was time to go full circle. My first XBOX3 60 allowed me to build my current computer and now my current computer was the reason I would be buying my second XBOX 360.
I ordered the Xbox $360 from Overstock for 360, but thanks to a heads up from Sam of this deal (remember what I said about my bad luck??) I was able to call in after an unsuccessful live chat and the nice lady credited me with 45 dollars to my Overstock account. I'll probably get a second controller. :nikko:
Set Up
Setting up the XBOX 360 was ridiculously easy. I basically just followed the directions to hook it up to my TV (1080i :yum
and ran an ethernet cable from my router to the Xbox. Then I went to http://www.xbox.com/pcsetup per instructions and downloaded a small file. I ran the file and it connected to my Xbox. When I walked out to the living room I was surprised and excited to be greeted with the Media Center menu that I had grown accustomed to.
It looks and feels exactly like it does on my PC. The remote lags just a little bit, but everything is really responsive. The first test was to watch live and recorded TV and everything performed exactly like it does on my PC. I could pause, rewind, fast forward, set up schedules to record stuff (Like Wheel of Fortune for my mom! :p )
They wanted to see pictures from my sister's wedding so I started a slideshow with the full resolution images streaming from my computer. Viewing the files at 1080i is simply amazing compared to the s-video cable I used to run to the TV. The slideshow didn't lag at all even though it was being streamed from the PC.
Other Media: Transcode 360
Of course, TV is only half the battle. Media Center also allows you to listen to your music (works just like from Windows MCE) and movies. The problem, however, is that the extender does not support DivX, Xvid, etc. codecs, which means you're SOL if you want to play back your legally backed up DVDs... or are you?Luckily, someone has come up with a solution. Transcode 360. Basically what it does is it converts the divx files to wmv faster than real time and then streams the file to the Xbox360 (extender) where it plays. After trying it on about 3-4 movies, I'm pretty satisfied. The movies look great on the TV, especially a high definition DVD that I happened to have.
Transcode 360 is able to transcode most media formats, but Windows Media Center doesn't recognize all formats as video files (.mov, mp4, etc.. I stumbled upon a registry hack that fixes all of that too.
1. Open Regedit
2. Expand HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
3. Find the extension you want WMCE to recognize as a video file
4. Add a string value to that entry called "PerceivedType"
5. Set the value to "video"
Games
Oh yeah, those. :p I only have GRAW (free!) right now, but I've played a bunch of games in the Arcade and they're pretty fun. I ordered Rockstar's Table Tennis (32 shipped from Outpost) which should be here in a day, and Burnout Revenge (17 shipped from eBay, I had some money in my Paypal acct) so that should keep me occupied for a while. Of course I got a subscription to Xbox Live and some marketplace points as well.
I also have a Harmony Xbox 360 remote coming in soon I hope
Have you finished watching 24 Season 1 yet? Jack Bauer needs you