NBC Direct Launches With Free Downloads

thefickler writes "It's here, and it's no joke. NBC has launched NBC Direct where most shows can be watched online and some shows are available for full episode downloads. This comes after NBC decided to pull out of iTunes." For now it's Windows only, XP or Vista, IE 6 or 7.

Comments

Re:Finally!

[foobsr]

Three years of Slashdotting and I finally get first post. THERE IS A GOD.

Things only happen at the right time (10:42)

CC.

You can play any vid on the 360 now

[jollyreaper]

Sort of a slashvertisement but it's related to the topic here. Microsoft, being the douches they are, give you a perfectly fine piece of hardware in the 360 but lock it down so you can't view anything but approved videos on it. They put in the really cool feature of streaming off of your PC but again, the PC needs XP, has to be running MediaPlayer 11, and using proprietary MS formats. Sucks, right? But no longer.

Using this neat little program, you can host videos on your PC and use it for the share connection rather than mediaplayer. Videos are transcoded to an acceptable MS format on the fly. The only drawback is that transcoded files have to be completed before search features will work -- no fast-forward or rewind. You can work around that by force-starting the encode cycle and then renaming the resulting cache file and playing it directly.

An installation guide.

The TVersity software download.

Granted, you'd probably find yourself having less of a headache if you just built a dedicated media center PC and sat it next to the Xbox. Myself, I just find the thought of having to buy duplicate hardware offensive.