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Windows 7 Streams Media To the Xbox 360 and PS3 Seamlessly

Posted by Soulskill on from the let's-see-this-on-the-big-screen dept.

HardcoreWare reports that the release candidate for Windows 7 contains improved video codecs, and does a much better job of streaming media to popular consoles out of the box. "No longer will you have to install special REG files to 'trick' Windows into streaming video to your PS3 or XBOX 360. And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers like TVersity that transcode video, severely reducing quality and cause unnecessary CPU load on the server."

7 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. how is this a good thing? by Rennt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or you could just share your videos via samba and watch them with XBMC on the original xbox - this has worked great for years.

    The fact that this is news shows exactly how broken closed source platforms are. The only reason this is not already possible is because you are not in contol of hardware that you own.

    1. Re:how is this a good thing? by revengebomber · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Alright, if I have just exactly the right format I can stream to my 360 or PS3 from any standard server. However, all of my files are in various different formats, many of which (like Matroska) are completely alien to EVERYTHING proprietary. XBMC plays 99% of my media just fine, right out of the box from an xbmsd server on my Linux desktop. I still haven't been able to configure transcoding properly, and out of ~250gb of video, only 3 or 4 files will play on the PS3. Commercial media centers, especially the 360 and PS3, are a fucking joke. It's downright embarassing that a homebrew effort on a 8 year old console beats them in every regard on an SDTV.

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  2. Matroska and ASS Subs? by mcnazar · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What about MKV containers and ASS subtitles. I bet it can't handle those or if it does, it renders these crappily.

    No thanks! I'll stick to my chipped XBox server running Samba on Gentoo and my other chipped Xbox running XBMC.

    This setup worked better in 2005 than Microsoft's current offering.

  3. Re:windows streaming to 360 by Inda · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just install Windows Media Centre. Forget all that other rubbish. A manual handshake is needed by way of typing in a key code - just follow the onscreen instructions. Share folders in windows as normal. Nothing could be easier.

    Xvid plays fine from the Video Library. VOBs must be played in the 360's WMC. WMV ... heh.

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    This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  4. The real solution is.... by Jackie_Chan_Fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The real solution is simple do not use consoles for viewing media. Use a PC.

    Build yourself nice small PC with some horse power and HDMI out. Network it to a storage server and play every dam media format available easily.

    I dont know why we keep trying to stream stuff to game consoles. I'm guilty of it as well, but why turn a console into a PC when we already have PCs capable of far more, with more freedom and less headaches?

    Its the fault of the console makers really. They want to let you do somethings, but they really dont want you to do other things :)

    Sony could have done far better, even though its fairly good at what it does. It still cant play DVD's with regions outside of yours. It still cant play MKV, it still has poor MP4 support.

    Its just not going to happen. Build a small PC and use it for watching media.

    1. Re:The real solution is.... by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's been said before but I guess I'll say it again. I already have a DVD player, Game console, digital cable box, and surround sound receiver sitting by my TV. I don't want yet another box sitting there, when one of the current ones has all the physical capabilities to perform this task. All we need is software

      My game console is the Wii. Which is the weakest of the current gen systems. Using homebrew, I'm able to watch videos. It works great. There's some movies that don't play, either because of encoding errors, or unsupported codecs, and network is a little slow, but on the whole it works pretty good. If there was commercial software product that "just worked" and provided this functionality, I would be one of the first to buy it. I will get around to building a media centre box sometime, but until then we should at least let the boxes do what we all know they are capable of.

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      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  5. Re:Not so new... by Methlin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think it's funny when people don't even RTFS...

    You can stream to the PS3 from WMP11. In fact, you can stream to any device that implements the right set of UPnP media functionality.

    From the summary:

    And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers

    What's even funnier is people who RTFS but don't understand it. What "And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers" means is you will not have to use a 3rd party UPnP media server as that service (DLNA) will be built into Win7.

    The bit about not having to transcode, that's a load of hogwash as the PS3/Xbox360 only support certain subsets of certain codecs, anything that exceeds those subsets MUST be transcoded.