Windows 7 Streams Media To the Xbox 360 and PS3 Seamlessly 121
HardcoreWare reports that the release candidate for Windows 7 contains improved video codecs, and does a much better job of streaming media to popular consoles out of the box. "No longer will you have to install special REG files to 'trick' Windows into streaming video to your PS3 or XBOX 360. And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers like TVersity that transcode video, severely reducing quality and cause unnecessary CPU load on the server."
how is this a good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you could just share your videos via samba and watch them with XBMC on the original xbox - this has worked great for years.
The fact that this is news shows exactly how broken closed source platforms are. The only reason this is not already possible is because you are not in contol of hardware that you own.
Matroska and ASS Subs? (Score:2, Insightful)
What about MKV containers and ASS subtitles. I bet it can't handle those or if it does, it renders these crappily.
No thanks! I'll stick to my chipped XBox server running Samba on Gentoo and my other chipped Xbox running XBMC.
This setup worked better in 2005 than Microsoft's current offering.
Re:windows streaming to 360 (Score:5, Insightful)
Xvid plays fine from the Video Library. VOBs must be played in the 360's WMC. WMV
The real solution is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real solution is simple do not use consoles for viewing media. Use a PC.
Build yourself nice small PC with some horse power and HDMI out. Network it to a storage server and play every dam media format available easily.
I dont know why we keep trying to stream stuff to game consoles. I'm guilty of it as well, but why turn a console into a PC when we already have PCs capable of far more, with more freedom and less headaches?
Its the fault of the console makers really. They want to let you do somethings, but they really dont want you to do other things :)
Sony could have done far better, even though its fairly good at what it does. It still cant play DVD's with regions outside of yours. It still cant play MKV, it still has poor MP4 support.
Its just not going to happen. Build a small PC and use it for watching media.
Re:The real solution is.... (Score:5, Insightful)
My game console is the Wii. Which is the weakest of the current gen systems. Using homebrew, I'm able to watch videos. It works great. There's some movies that don't play, either because of encoding errors, or unsupported codecs, and network is a little slow, but on the whole it works pretty good. If there was commercial software product that "just worked" and provided this functionality, I would be one of the first to buy it. I will get around to building a media centre box sometime, but until then we should at least let the boxes do what we all know they are capable of.
Re:how is this a good thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not so new... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's funny when people don't even RTFS...
You can stream to the PS3 from WMP11. In fact, you can stream to any device that implements the right set of UPnP media functionality.
From the summary:
And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers
What's even funnier is people who RTFS but don't understand it. What "And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers" means is you will not have to use a 3rd party UPnP media server as that service (DLNA) will be built into Win7.
The bit about not having to transcode, that's a load of hogwash as the PS3/Xbox360 only support certain subsets of certain codecs, anything that exceeds those subsets MUST be transcoded.