Xbox 360 Question

[Hi Ho]

I am a PC gamer but I finally caved in and bought an Xbox so I could play with friends online.

I thought a side benefit of the 360 might be the ability to stream videos, pictures, and music from my PC by using it as a MCE extender. Pictures work fine. Movies and music are another story.

I tried playing some Top Gear episodes downloaded in AVI format and I get an error saying there is no codec for this video. Is there any way to make the 360 play AVI files?

The second problem I'm having is with music. I can see my entire music library on the 360 but I can only play less than 1% of the songs. The very few that are in MP3 or WMA format play fine but the rest, which are in WAV format simply give me an error that says "There was an error playing this file" or something close to that. Does the 360 not play WAV files? That seems really limiting if it doesn't. I'm really liking the super informative error messages the 360 throws out.

 

[Rickster71]

Here is a link to Xbox 360 support / knowledge base.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/?WT.svl=nav
They have forums also.
Hope this helps, good luck.

 

[ivseenbetter]

I use a program called TVersity that allows me to access everything on my computer throught the xbox. Check it out...it's pretty useful.

 

[GlocksRock]

Also check out Twonkymedia, it will play more video/audio files than what the xbox supports. It's not free, but it works really well, and I like it better than Tversity and it works very well with both my 360 and PS3.

 

[JerryLove]

"AVI" is just a packaging method. Any number of CODECs can be used an packaged into an AVI. Your X-Box doesn't support the format many of your AVIs use (Xvid, Divx, whatever).

Sony does regular updates to supported CODECs. MS may do the same (or there may be a way to install more CODECS). The link to the X-Box forums would be the most useful.

There are also programs that run pc-side that convert while streaming. Again, the best place to ask about those is the X-Box forum.

 

[GlocksRock]

http://www.twonkyvision.de/

http://tversity.com/

http://xbox360forums.com

From the Twonky website:

Content formats

Music: MP3, WMA, WAV, 3GP, M4A, MP4, LPCM, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP2, AC3, MPA, MP1, AIF, ASF
Photo: JPEG, PNG, TIF, BMP, GIF
Video: MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG2-TS, MPEG4, AVI, WMV, VOB, DivX, 3GP, VDR, ASF, MPE, DVR-MS, Xvid, M1V, M4V
Internet Radio: vTuner, Shoutcast
Playlists: WPL, PLS, M3U
Note: the actual formats supported depend on the individual client devices. The current version of TwonkyMedia does not provide transcoding functionality.


From the Tversity FAQ section:

What media formats are currently supported?
The current version is designed such that almost anything you can play on Windows Media Player, whether it resides locally on your computer or located on the Internet, should also play on any of the supported devices, despite the fact that these devices do not natively support many of these media formats. You can also play Quicktime video and Real Media videos (including rmvb), however for the time being you cannot stream Quicktime or Real from the Internet. To give a more precise definition, any media format that has a Directshow decoder will work with TVersity as long as you have the directshow decoder installed, this includes:

WMA, WMV, MJPEG, DVR-MS, AVI (including Divx3/4/5/6, Xvid, and others)
MPEG1/2/4 (including H.264), MP3 and AAC
Qucktime MOV
Real Video/Audio/RMVB
OGG Vorbis and OGM
FLAC, WMA lossless, Monkey Audio (APE), Musepack Audio (MPC) and Wavpack
Flash Video
Matroska (MKA and MKV)
Karaoke CDG/BIN (Directshow filters here, the ones from DirectX Karaoke and Troubadour Karaoke are not compatible with TVersity)
And many more…
Please refer to the Download page for some links to third party software.

 

[gus6464]

"AVI" is just a packaging method. Any number of CODECs can be used an packaged into an AVI. Your X-Box doesn't support the format many of your AVIs use (Xvid, Divx, whatever).

Sony does regular updates to supported CODECs. MS may do the same (or there may be a way to install more CODECS). The link to the X-Box forums would be the most useful.

There are also programs that run pc-side that convert while streaming. Again, the best place to ask about those is the X-Box forum.

The 360 got divx support in the last fall update.

 

[j_garcia]

I believe they said the 360 was going to drop in price to $199 next month. If you didn't buy used, I would have waited.

 

[engtaz]

I believe they said the 360 was going to drop in price to $199 next month. If you didn't buy used, I would have waited.

Where did you read that?

Thanks,
engtaz

 

[GlocksRock]

You can get a 360 from www.consumerdepot.com for $189, it's an open box unit, but comes with everything just like brand new... I've bought 2 from them, and just got a open box PS3 yesterday for $275 + shipping, and it came packaged just like a brand new unit, even though it was used... it even came with the Spiderman 3 blu ray movie.

I very highly doubt that M$ will drop the 360 to $199, especially since they only dropped the premium 20 gig versions to $299 just to clear them out so they could make room for the new 60 gig premium ones.

 

[ivseenbetter]

http://www.twonkyvision.de/

http://tversity.com/

http://xbox360forums.com

From the Twonky website:

Content formats

Music: MP3, WMA, WAV, 3GP, M4A, MP4, LPCM, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP2, AC3, MPA, MP1, AIF, ASF
Photo: JPEG, PNG, TIF, BMP, GIF
Video: MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG2-TS, MPEG4, AVI, WMV, VOB, DivX, 3GP, VDR, ASF, MPE, DVR-MS, Xvid, M1V, M4V
Internet Radio: vTuner, Shoutcast
Playlists: WPL, PLS, M3U
Note: the actual formats supported depend on the individual client devices. The current version of TwonkyMedia does not provide transcoding functionality.


From the Tversity FAQ section:

What media formats are currently supported?
The current version is designed such that almost anything you can play on Windows Media Player, whether it resides locally on your computer or located on the Internet, should also play on any of the supported devices, despite the fact that these devices do not natively support many of these media formats. You can also play Quicktime video and Real Media videos (including rmvb), however for the time being you cannot stream Quicktime or Real from the Internet. To give a more precise definition, any media format that has a Directshow decoder will work with TVersity as long as you have the directshow decoder installed, this includes:

WMA, WMV, MJPEG, DVR-MS, AVI (including Divx3/4/5/6, Xvid, and others)
MPEG1/2/4 (including H.264), MP3 and AAC
Qucktime MOV
Real Video/Audio/RMVB
OGG Vorbis and OGM
FLAC, WMA lossless, Monkey Audio (APE), Musepack Audio (MPC) and Wavpack
Flash Video
Matroska (MKA and MKV)
Karaoke CDG/BIN (Directshow filters here, the ones from DirectX Karaoke and Troubadour Karaoke are not compatible with TVersity)
And many more…
Please refer to the Download page for some links to third party software.

Thanks for the info. I didn't know about Twonkyvision. I might just check them out...but Tversity just came out with a new version and I like the new capabilities it has built into it...twonky will have to be impressive to beat it.

 

[Hi Ho]

Thanks for all the replies! Tversity looks very interesting. I'll probably play with it some this weekend. It was a long and hot day at work so I just want to blast some people away in Halo.

 

[corey]

I believe they said the 360 was going to drop in price to $199 next month. If you didn't buy used, I would have waited.

Any details on this? I'm not much into games, but at $200 the 360 would get on my short list as a music source. I've used it before, and really like being able to make on-the-fly playlists.

 

[GlocksRock]

You can get a 360 premium for $189 from www.consumerdepot.com or www.overstockdealz.com they aren't brand new, but they are in like new condition with the factory box and packaged with everything it normally comes with. I've ordered two of them in the past and never had any issues from either one. Just got a PS3 from them as well, and so far it's been excellent.