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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."

10 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Not so new... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    WMP11 has long supported streaming to the 360. I have WMP11 on my XP laptop, and it works like a charm....

    1. Re:Not so new... by XDirtypunkX · · Score: 5, Informative

      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. There are even a reasonable number of digital media receivers that offer this functionality from 3rd parties too, meaning you don't have to deal with either MS or Sony, which is a plus in my book.

  2. Odd article by boaworm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It looks like it cannot make up its mind:

    --

    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.
    --
    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:
    --
    The Playstation 3 streams through UPnP.
    --

    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
    1. Re:Odd article by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 4, Informative

      UPnP serves up the plain ol' media to the client.

      However, some UPnP servers are smart enough to know some UPnP clients can't decode certain files, so it, in real time, transcodes to formats they know are readable by most clients.

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    2. Re:Odd article by k-macjapan · · Score: 5, Informative

      And that is why I will not stop using PS3Mediaserver(http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/). It is by far the best UPnP client for PS3 and is catching on with Xbox360 users as well.

      It is an open source project that is updated quite frequently. For anyone still using Tversity I would highly recommend giving this a shot. It transcodes all basically all formats for viewing on the PS3.

      The official forum for PS3Mediaserver = http://ps3mediaserver.org/forum/ You can find beta builds here and interesting conversation.

  3. No transcoding if natively supported on console by beef3k · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

    --
    This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  6. 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.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.