1 post tagged “media center”
NOTE: There is a Vista Beta edition of Transcode 360 available now, which solves the permissions workaround in this tutorial.
Recently I took a passing interest in Microsoft's Windows Media Center, mostly because it looks gorgeous and I had heard it was easy to use. After realizing that Xbox 360's have MCE support, this passing interest became a prevalent one. Then it occurred to me that there are three Xbox 360's in the house. I about exploded with anticipation as I looked into what flavor of Media Center to pick up.
I decided on Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Build 5840 (The closest thing to final release available at the moment), mostly because it's Vista. You know, the shiny.
Anyway, setting up Media Center with a 360 is, in and of itself, a piece of cake. Run Media Center on the desktop, and go through the wizard on the 360. Takes about five minutes, tops. However, I quickly encountered a problem: for some reason that defies...reason, MCE on the 360 refuses to stream anything but Windows Media Video (WMV) format videos. But, what about all of my XVID, Quicktime, MPEG4, and other file types? This is a load of crap.
Fortunately, Google loves me.
A quick search and a bit of reading the 'friendly' manual led me to an amazing little piece of software called Transcode 360. It integrates right into MCE, adding an option to transcode a file under the 'More' menu. Simply click that, and the MCE server (my desktop) will convert anything into WMV and stream it straight to the 360, without so much as a hiccup.
The only remaining problem here is...Transcode 360 requires a bit of special treatment under Vista in order to work properly. Written in .NET 1.1 for Windows XP Media Center Edition, Transcode 360 has a few security issues. Due to the way Vista handles file security, if you install Transcode 360 to it's default directory, it will crash when MCE tries to use it. To get around that, simply install the app under the Media Center user directory:
I used C:\Users\Mcx1\Documents\Transcode360 as my full path, but anything should work so long as it is in the Mcx1 directory. Note: This user directory will not be there until you have run the Media Extender Wizard at least once.
Also, you must have .NET 1.1 and .NET 1.1 SP1 installed. Vista Build 5840 comes with .NET 2.0 only, so you need to install them yourself. Those redistributables should work fine.
And with that, it works like a beauty. Transcoding on my Athlon X2 4200+ takes only about 15 minutes to process a 700MB, 1 hour 30 minute XVID file. Playback starts almost immediately after clicking on the transcode button, and the quality is quite good. Transcode 360 manages to make the entire process essentially seamless, sans the Vista tweaks needed to get it functional.
I'm going to go watch some Venture Bros now. じゃまた
