Having a Media Center PC somewhere in the house and extend the content from it using an Xbox 360 is absolutely a good idea. But does it work? Chris Anderson thinks it does.
First take: XBox 360 Media Center extender
Having a Media Center PC somewhere in the house and extend the content from it using an Xbox 360 is absolutely a good idea. But does it work? Chris Anderson thinks it does.
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Myself I find it very disappointing that you need XP Media Center Edition in order to stream video from your computer. XBOX360 and XP Service Pack 2 will allow you to play music and watch your family photos – but no video! This cannot be a hardware issue since even the five year old XBOX (with some modifications…) could run the xbox media center. I guess they decided not to screw over their HTPC hardware partners and make the price tag of the preinstalled Media Center Edition PC’s look to silly.
But just imagine what a piece of hardware this could have been with a tv tuner…
Dell charges the same amount for XP Home and MCE2005 and HP only charges $20 to upgrade to MCE2005. I think it is lame that people keep complaining about this. If you bought a pc in the last year or will in the future there is no excuse not to get MCE2005. If you build a PC you can get MCE2005 OEM for a few bucks more than XP Home, and the basic version of Vista will have Media Center built in.
This is of course correct. However I believe there’s some real good arguments for not upgrading from, say XP professional to XP Media Center Edition. This means that you’ll end up with two OS on your computer and need to reboot every time you want to change OS.
And the fact that it doesn’t play formats like divx and avi means that this does not by far give you the possibilities that the (illicit) xbox media center will do.
I an interested to make a A/V server for home application. where can I find the software and the hardware requirment for application. for Audio I need 4 outs and for Video also I need four outs.
Can you help me.
I am sorry, but I have no experience with systems that have several separate video outputs. For several audio outputs you can use multiple audio cards and the excellent software called J River Media Center. It supports multi zones for audio.