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Aging Consoles Find New Life As Video Streamers

Posted by Soulskill on from the everybody-needs-a-second-job-these-days dept.

MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is six years old. The Nintendo Wii is five years old, and so is the Sony PlayStation 3. All three are due for an overhaul (can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?), and while they're still popular gaming platforms, consoles are really starting to shine as streaming media centers. According to market research firm Nielsen, streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. Xbox 360 owners now use their consoles to stream video 14 percent of the time, which is almost as much as PS3 users (15 percent). But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time."

4 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Re:let me go home and cry some more by Belial6 · · Score: 5, Informative

    GOG.com is the place for that too. Cheap prices. DRM free.

  2. Power by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Informative

    No wonder that set-top boxes don't sell.

    The bad part about this is that the set-top boxes draw a very small fraction of the power as the game consoles, which are power hungry beasts. I'm just spouting crap off randomly, as is my wont, but the Wii would have to be the lowest power consumer of the 3 major console systems. However the Wii would still be vastly more power hungry than a Roku, TiVo or Apple TV.

    Okay, okay. I can't believe I'm doing this here on Slashdot (backing up my assertions with references) but here you go:
    http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm
        The Wii uses 1/10th the power of an XBox 360 or PS3. A quick search shows that a Roku uses around 5-6 watts when in use, which is half of the Wii's 11 watts.

      So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
    1. Re:Power by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.

      Unfortunately, the Wii only does 480p. That's OK if you don't have much bandwidth and you're streaming Netflix, which is my situation, but it's a bit pathetic if you have a >40" 1080p TV and you're trying to stream something from your local server. What's worse, it doesn't actually have enough CPU to decode any high-res streams and scale them down, so you're pretty much limited to SDTV-resolution media. The 360 and PS3 are DLNA clients, so you can use them with PS3MediaServer on your PC to play anything that they can't handle themselves because they don't have a codec. Of course, that means you also have to have a computer capable of transcoding the media in realtime running at the same time, and ticking over nicely to boot. But it's the only solution that permits you to play essentially any file you might come across. The original Xbox with XBMC used to be that solution, but it can't handle 1080p media and it has only 1080i (or 720p, or lower-resolution) output.

      The original Xbox was pretty good for its day, but it's pretty pathetic by modern standards. The Wii is what you'd really like to use, if only it had a touch more CPU and HD output. The next Nintendo system is supposed to cover those bases.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:wii is an awesome netflix appliance by thedohman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Speaking of using the Konami code in netflix... A slightly modified version can be to deactivate the account, so you can reactivate it. In theory you could use trial accounts, and just keep deactivating it to start a new trial account. I wouldn't be surprised if they tracked this and disabled Wiis that do it too much, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bother. (Got this from their tech support when we had a phantom account issue. Re-activating with the same account fixed our issue, but cleared our instant queue, recently watched, etc.).
    Slightly modified: U U D D L R L R U U U U

    Oh, and I'd say for now we use the Wii for Netflix and the homebrew WiiMC ( http://www.wiimc.org/ ) (for shoutcast 'radio', mostly) for about 80% of the Wii usage, and about 50% of total tv use. There is a 360 wrapped and under the tree, so those numbers will go down very soon.