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Windows 7 Streams Media To the Xbox 360 and PS3 Seamlessly
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."
WMP11 has long supported streaming to the 360. I have WMP11 on my XP laptop, and it works like a charm....
It looks like it cannot make up its mind:
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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.
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So how are you going to stream to the PS3? The PS3 is a UPnP client, of course you have to provide UPnP services. That has nothing to do with the transcoding.
They they state:
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The Playstation 3 streams through UPnP.
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So, now you do use UPnP.
And sure it is convenient to have this built-in, but why would that use less resources than a 3rd party server? The job has to be done anyway...
Its a nice feature, especially if they can get transcoding to work smoothly in conjunction with pausing, stopping, searching backwards and forwards in files. Otherwise the new PS3 feature to get 1 minute snapshots to browse back and forth in episodes will not work very well.
From what I can see from the format list, they don't do transcoding anyway, they just provide UPnP streaming, and it is way too rough when it says "YES/OK" for XVid/DivX. That depends not on the container, but what is contained in them. Some DivX files I have are not encoded with standard mp3 sound, hence they are not playable without transcoding to begin with.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
... assuming Microsoft really is supporting MP4 and other non-WMV-based codecs by default. Of course, they'll get all this credit from their fanbase for basically just catching up to where the rest of the world already has been for a couple years.
I still have a suspicion WMV will get snuck in when people least expect it - time will tell.
#DeleteChrome
I stream video and audio content to my PS3 via TVersity (and MediaTomb on a linux box) all the time. There's never any transcoding involved for files that the PS3 natively supports. How exactly is a Windows 7 machine supposed to serve alien formats to a PS3? The ones "tested" in the article are all natively supported. There's no way for the PS3 to play back content in formats it doesn't support unless the host computer transcodes the media.
So any device using this subset of UPnP A/V should work. DLNA 1.0 devices included. Check for the mark on your consumer electronics... or try to make the coherence plugin work -_-
Mu
As long as you have a compatible router, Windows Media Player 11 streams via UPnP with very minimal setup. You configure media sharing in your library, then you allow the devices you want to see your media.
In fact, the process for me was this simple:
1) Install a bunch of codecs (divx/xvid) for the formats I wanted to stream.
2) Go to "Media Sharing..." under the library tab in WMP11 and tick the "Share My Media" box, then allow the 360 and the PS3.
3) Connect from the Console.
There is no need to put in special .reg files for this functionality. In fact, all you need is a codec that will allow you to load the files into your library on your PC. Unlike TVersity, Windows Media Player won't transcode stuff that's not supported, it will just refuse to play on your device.
The big thing here is that they're actually adding support for the other codecs out of the box and maybe making the process more automated.
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.
I hope they add transcoding (perhaps hardware accelerated) because without it, streaming various formats is very trouble some.
Currently I am using PMS (PS3 Media Server for Win/Mac/Linux http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/) to watch movies on my PS3 and there is minimal quality from transcoding as PMS can create 70+Mbps MPEG2 streams on the fly. Only thing it current is missing is ability to playback ripped DVDs.
- Raynet --> .
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.
The reg hacking is for all the formats (chiefly .m4a and .mp4, if memory serves) that the 360 and PS3 will play just fine, but Microsoft don't like to point WMP at out of the box, because they're a little bit too Apple-y, or something.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
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.
... heh.
Xvid plays fine from the Video Library. VOBs must be played in the 360's WMC. WMV
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
It's a shame that uShare is the only one that can stream to the xbox. I used it for a long while because it's pretty lightweight, but it turns out mediatomb is as well and can stream to the ps3 perfectly. You can set up all sorts of custom transcoding operations in mediatomb, though of course if it's for the 360 then this is no use to you.
WMP11. Add files to your Media Library. Go to your Library Settings, then Configure Sharing. Settings button again, then Allow new devices and computers automatically. Reboot for good measure (we're using Windows here), reboot your Xbox 360, and try and play the media you added to your Library in WMP. If it works, go back to the Library settings and untick the automagic box. What I want to know, is it says I need to download codecs... But how?!
Since when has anyone had to "trick" their PC into streaming to their Xbox? Put the videos somewhere that Media Player can see them, set up the Xbox as a media extender and you can watch them on your XBox as long as your PC is online.
Installing REG files? Does TFA author have any idea what they're talking about or did I suffer a head injury and forgot this part of getting my movies on the XBox?
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
I doubt we will see it support Matroska .MKV files. I'm sure they want everyone to use WMV.
I'm not sure if i'm a fan of .MKV but the asian films I watch are mostly in mkv format. Its probably because of subtitles. Will windows 7 start supporting .srt files? I doubt it. I doubt it will support MKV.
I'm sure Tversity... or even better, PS3 Media Server, will still be required unfortunately.
Of course SONY could solve this issue by supporting codecs/containers better but i doubt that it is in their interest.
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.
I have a media center computer hooked up to the big screen for that, why would I care what a console can do with media files?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Nice as it is to have this on your desktop, I'd much rather have decend UPNP/DLNS/whatever on my NAS.
Does this have any ramifications for the server build? Better yet, are there any BSD or OpenSolaris with similar functionality out of the box that'd give you ZFS capabilities?
Did you even read the article? The whole point is that Windows 7 supports more formats than it used to, although MKV is not one of them . As far as Sony goes, they've been increasing support for file formats and containers from the outset, so whether it's in their interest or not, they've been doing what you want.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I use Connect360 and MediaLink from Nullriver to stream from my Mac to my Xbox 360 and PS3. Works great so I dont see all the fuss when everybody been doing for years what Windows 7 is allowing (one way or another) so meh. Theres a cheap easy solution for whatever platform you running (Linux, Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS X) already available so go out and get it.
Try ps3MediaServer ( http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/ ) It works with the 360 and is the best app I have found for this.
It's a shame that uShare is the only one that can stream to the xbox. I used it for a long while because it's pretty lightweight, but it turns out mediatomb is as well and can stream to the ps3 perfectly. You can set up all sorts of custom transcoding operations in mediatomb, though of course if it's for the 360 then this is no use to you.
Indeed. I helped a friend set up streaming media from a Linux machine to his XBOX 360, which was a tremendous pain in the ass. That's when you find out the hard way what embrace-and-extend is all about, because apparently Microsoft chose to slightly alter the uPNP standard for the 360 (is anyone surprised at that?). What I found was that a Java program called x360mediaserver can correctly stream music (mp3s) while uShare can correctly stream videos (mostly AVIs). uShare claims to be able to stream both video and music, and in a way it does, except that the music shows up as a flat unsorted list with no categories whatsoever, such as artist or album, which is not very useful at all when you have thousands of mp3s (yes, that's with its XBOX360 compatibility option, because without that option, nothing shows up at all). To get things working in a reasonable way, we run the two servers, one for music and one for video. That provides the closest approximation of how the media shows up when it's served by a Windows machine using Windows Media Player.
Really, Microsoft's apparent hatred of simply following an open standard in order to be compatible gets old, and what really gets old are the extra measures needed to accommodate it. Most of the time it's just selfish of them, but sometimes it really seems like a religious thing because in this particular case I can't see how it helps them sell products at all. It doesn't make anyone want to run Windows for the sole purpose of streaming media to a gaming console; what it does do is make their customers feel like they are being "punished" with an extra burden for not having done so. If it accomplished anything that simply could not possibly be done via the uPNP standard I wouldn't complain, but this isn't the case. It's just needless complication.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Sony is slow at doing EVERYTHING.
Windows 7 supporting divx/xvid is no big deal. Its a little too late thing and thats the point.
Still no MKV support.
Will windows 7 support the latest divx spec or will it be behind just like the 360 and PS3's divx support?
The latest divx atleast supports mkv containers and subs.
What about [...] ASS subtitles.
That has got to be the shittiest acronym ever! I wonder who would approve of it; you know, who would get behind it.
How about adding Windows Media Center support for the PS3? Its the only reason I turn my 360 on anymore. I believe I've just answered my own question.
Ah, I never did try the music thing with ushare, or at least not after the first time. It grind to a halt right around 1000 songs. I put this down to lack of resources on the server it was on (266MHz, 32MB of RAM). But mediatomb is fine with it, for flat mode. You need much more for transcoding and I gave up on album/artist/genre indexing after two days of it grinding away at my 40G music collection and not appearing to get anywhere.
With a real PC I'm sure it would be fine. Also, I wonder what it would take to get the xbox extensions from ushare running in MT. Hmmm...
I'm hoping it will stream easily at speeds approaching that of NFS to devices like the WDTV. Right now I'm streaming 720p over a windows samba share, but it sure would be nice to have built-in faster transfers at speeds that would allow HD content to stream to the devices that can decode it on the fly.
I have an xbox360 and 64-bit WMC TV Pack 2008. When I installed the 32-bit and 64-bit ffdshow stuff plus some beta 64-bit splitters everything works relatively well in WMC (64-bit) and WMP (32-bit, at least the one on the desktop). But there are still little annoyances. For example I cannot watch subtitles, skipping to chapters does not work, nor does FF in WMC. There are some ways to cobble those things in, but they did not work too well for me. Personally I am a big fan of ffmpeg-mt builds of mplayer and the SMPlayer skin on Windows instead. The other thing that is not so great about using the xbox360 with WMC is that in Vista the WMC does no transcoding, so if the Xbox360 dashboard cannot play the video file, you will not be able to watch it on the xbox360 from your library on the PC. Windows 7 adds this transcoding feature. What the xbox360 is good for is when my son plays RCT3 on the PC, then my wife can watch TV shows she has recorded on the xbox360.
The nice thing about Windows 7 in relation to media is that MS provides a much wider selection of audio and video codecs and splitters for more containers than ever before. That is nice for those that are not into using things like mplayer, vlc, or ffdshow. The bad thing is that somehow Windows 7 treats the system supplied ones as special so things like ffdshow and Maali media splitter stopped working, the MS provided stuff was always used first. By now I think the devs have a handle on stuff like this but it was a pain in the neck. It required changes in a portion of the registry that admin users could not change, SetACL needed to be used to allow modification first:
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-145906.html
There are reasons you might want to use the non-MS stuff. For example the system provided ones seem to be more resource intensive than the alternatives, for example if you have an NV card and CoreAVC (which you had to pay money for) or ffmpeg-mt. The system supplied stuff does not seem to understand chapters in MKV and MP4. There is not a nice way to have subtitles automatically superimposed on your video.
WMP11. Add files to your Media Library. Go to your Library Settings, then Configure Sharing. Settings button again, then Allow new devices and computers automatically. Reboot for good measure (we're using Windows here), reboot your Xbox 360, and try and play the media you added to your Library in WMP. If it works, go back to the Library settings and untick the automagic box. What I want to know, is it says I need to download codecs... But how?!
You can download free codec packs that you can install on WIndows much like any application, except that they're basically DLLs that programs like WMP can use. Just be very careful about where you get the codec pack. Make sure it's from a well-known, trustworthy site because I've heard that many unscrupulous sites offer codec packs that also include malware.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I am glad to hear that microsoft is making it easier to view media.