who runs a media center PC/extender?

Does anyone run media center (not media player) on any sort of regular basis? (either xp mce or vista)

I am in the process of building up a beastly home server/media server, and I would be interested to hear what some people tend to use it for.

I personally strongly dislike the Media Center application. It's way too slow for me. Looks nice and all, but there's a price for it. I have an extender, and have thus far been unable to get it to even see XP Pro or Windows 7, which rather bothers me... 7 comes built in with Media Center. So I said screw it, and hooked my laptop up to the TV. Loaded my library from my PC streaming through the laptop, and I've got a nice secondary display, great for watching movies on short notice. Plus, I get the advantage of any PC games that laptop can play (very few), and YouTube on my TV. And because it's streaming through my laptop, I know I have all the codecs required to play any of my media, and don't have to worry about the 360 or Media Center deciding they don't like my 400 .flac songs.

what extender do you have?

It was a Linksys WMCE54AG. Wireless b/g, composite/component output, might have even had optical... ethernet, USB... not a bad little device.

I added my brother's Vista laptop to our WLAN and it notified me that it found an xbox 360 on the network and guided me through using the Media Center to stream media to the xbox (I normally use a combination of Twonky to serve media that I already have and Playon to steam from Hulu/CBS) and the interface is quite nice, it's extremely easy to use. The fact that the laptop itself started the setup was nice too.

oh, ok but that is likely a bit different from the xbox 360 extender, which I have been testing and works well for just about everything I would need to use it for..

all music is in MP3 format, and my videos are in MPEG2 or DIVX format. pictures are all jpg

and those are the 3 main components I plan on using.

In my initial tests, everything ran smoothly, and that was streaming the same 7GB MPG file to 2 xbox 360s on the network at the same time, and the MCPC that the xbox is extending is actually a virtual machine running Win7 on WHS. Everything over ethernet (no wireless)

This was all without any network tweaking, like configuring my router to give priority, or tweaking the virtual win7 by killing off all the unneeded services.

I use Media Centre all the time (several house everyday), I use it for TV (Freeview in the UK). I do not use it for anything else such as videos as I prefer VLC for that, but I probably could (if it supports the codecs) use MC for everything for a media PC.

but you don't use an extender then?


my main goal is to be able to stream all my digital content to all the TVs in my house. The xbox seemed the best means for this, since I already had one for gaming, and came into an unopened 60GB model (with 2 games) for only $150, so I got that and put it in the bedroom. Now having 2 of them, i figured using it as an extender versus having to get a PC for each TV (and my bedroom TV doesnt even have PC input) made sense.

The coolest thing I have been discovering, is that the extender is pretty much simply a small piece of software, and mostly some form of RDP protocol. This means if you connect to a XP MCE with a 360 you get the XP MCE interface, if you connect to a Windows 7 MCE with a 360 you get the Win7 MCE interface (which is MUCH easier to use, even more so than Vistas)

I can actually browse my network shares from the xbox and add folders to monitor for media content.

Since all the content will actually sit on a windows home server machine, the content will then be accessible from both xboxes, as well as my laptop, and my desktop computers.

There is also a MC SDK which if you develop a MC plugin, it will also be available when using MC on the xbox.

I still can't stand MC... the 360 is capable of seeing open libraries on its' own without the MC interface. With this, you can stream your music while playing a game. Wonderful feature. There are several ways of getting the 360 to see a PC like that; my personal favorite is TVersity. I have codecs installed for all my media, so TVersity can transcode them on the fly if the 360 doesn't recognize the file format. But if you know all your media is gonna be playable by default on the 360, then it loses some of the appeal. TVersity can also stream from several online channels, as an added bonus... and no clumsy MC interface.

Sorry if I seem to have a grudge against MC... it falls into the category of "very pretty at the cost of efficiency", and that's an instant killer for me. I value functionality far beyond design, and MC sees it the other way, as did Vista. Hence why I never installed it. Also why I hate WMP11. I have no problems relying on third-party software if I know it's going to consistently work better than the first-party solutions.

Yeah I was trying to avoid transcoding. In fact I didnt even want to convert my ripped DVDs to DIVX, so I just converted the VOB files to MPG so they are just the original MPEG2 streams right off the DVD.

So as for what you mention about streaming to xbox without the MC interface, yes, this is called Windows Media Connect, and I don't know how you could like that more than MC except as you say, for the fact of streaming music while you play.

It is nothing more than a crappy folder structure, which makes management a nightmare once you have LOTS of data shared out to it. I can do things like search and filter music in MC, and I get album art and some built in filtering to boot.

The real killer for using Media Connect though, is its total lack of support for MPEG2, It just won't even show an MPEG 2 file in a shared out folder when you go into videos in media connect on the 360. However media center on the 360 will stream both DIVX and MPEG2 just fine.

Also as far as I know (and I could be wrong on this) the 360 doesn't just see "open" (I think you are meaning shared) libraries on your network. It will see whatever you have shared out from WMP11 running over a service called "Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service". I have never had my xbox (in media center or media connect) just found media on my network that I had not explicitly told it to look for.

WMP11 (I believe) is natively exposed to Media Connect, but again, that'll be WMP's library. I happen to quite like the "crappy folder structure", because all of my music is already organized in a logical structure. Which means I can quickly find whatever I'm looking for. And since the interface is "crappy", it's also a lot snappier, which is a HUGE issue for me. Again, I value functionality over design, and while I do like things that look pretty, I won't stand them if they completely destroy the flow of whatever I'm doing.

I have several hundred movies, so it would require either a very complex folder structure, or just a giant list of movies. That is IF media connect supported playing MPEG2. It just doesn't really meet my needs. With MC, all I need to do is plop each MPG movie into its own folder (named the movie title) along with the DVDID.XML file, and MC goes out and grabs the DVD cover art, and all the tag info on the movie, and displays it all in a very nice, filterable, sortable way. Maybe it is just improvements in Windows 7 with media center, but it is not slow at all for me, and everything is as snappy as I could want it to be...

I'm not knocking your setup. I think you and I tend to have different opinions on a great deal of things ;) You use what works for you, and its good to have options.

I will still use media connect for a few quick things, and SP2 for Home server just added some more direct support for going from WHS shares to any media connect device, so I won't even need WMP to bridge anything.

Quote:

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That is IF media connect supported playing MPEG2.

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By itself, it fails to play a lot. That's why I have TVersity. It acts as a media server, and the 360 connects to it. As long as TVersity recognizes a file as being playable, it'll play on the 360, regardless of format.

with degraded performance and quality though through transcoding right?

I had tried a few transcoding products with the 360 before, and maybe it was just the hardware, but it seemed very slow, there were skips and lag, and the quality was coming through as though you could tell it was transcoded to some lower bitrate format

WinAmp Remote certainly isn't the best one out there... I've had more issues with that transcoding into a crappier signal than the original crappy signal. TVersity seems a lot sharper. Then again, I also have an old CRT TV, so no HD for me. As I mentioned earlier, I've got all my media streaming through my laptop to my TV and to separate speakers, so I can achieve music with ANY game, not just on the 360, plus all the added perks of having a PC. Personal preference, though. I'd prefer to set up an actual media server, but I don't have any extra hard drives for it... I do have an extra mobo though, so I may just skip to building one, and running it with HDMI or DVI to the fancy TV that I'll also get around to getting some day...

the really nice thing about windows home server is you don't have to worry about storage too much in the planning phase. Since you can mix/match/add/remove hard drives as needed from it (internal and external) it makes changing around the drive configuration very easy.

Most of my media server hardware is coming from newegg on monday, and with that is coming 2x1TB drives and I currently also have 2x750 that I will throw in.

When that fills up (in about 3 days after I build the thing) I will probably order a pair of 1.5TB drives from western digital. Then run about 160 a pop. Not cheap.. but I can remember 100MB drives costing more :) of course data was a lot smaller then too...

My media collection is still a measly 117GB, so streaming isn't a problem. It's all on a 320GB 7200rpm drive, and it's also a secondary, so it doesn't do a whole lot besides stream media anyway. I think I'm actually very much liking not having to worry about storage or a full desktop PC as a media server. I just loaded up WMP10, cleared out the existing library, then told it to watch the two network folders that store everything. Took a while to load the library initially, but with 117 gigs, it's understandable. All my data stays in one place, while being accessible in multiple places.

I use my xbox as an extender and have done for some time, having said that not being able to watch good quality is a pain. After my birthday I'm woking on an actual media centre pc to hook up to the telly as it would just work out easier.

I gave up on WMC because it wouldn't consistently connect to my 360. It had a tendency to drop the connection after about half an hour and then refuse to find it again, even after switching on and off, etc. A few days later, it would be working again.
Now I just run iTunes and Remote on the iPhone, and have given up on movies until I can afford a media centre PC.

Give TVersity a try. I haven't had any issues with it, unless you have multiple PC's running TVersity on the same network... then it may or may not see each individual PC, but it *should* merge both libraries on the 360. Pretty neat, albeit a little confusing if you don't know what's going on. Took my roomie and I a few to figure it out.