Media Extenders/Windows 7/Netflix/You
This morning I made a leap. Until today I’ve had my house setup with an old style xbox modded with xbmc running on it. This has been great for watching tv shows on my 51 inch tv and 2 speakers.
About 2 weeks ago I finally made the leap to purchasing a real receiver and bought the additional speakers to bring me up to the age of 5.1 surround sound.
It’s wonderful, but with it comes a price. I then came to realize that all of the TV shows I’ve been downloading over the years only have 2 channel sound. I would just get higher quality versions of the shows, but they will not play on the old xbox.
Purchasing things as always, snowballs
I moved my Home Theater PC (HTPC) from my room to the living room so that I could connect it in to the receiver. For the last 4 months I’ve been running the Beta of Windows 7 on my HTPC and after a little bit of tweaking I’ve had it running smoothly and LOVE Windows 7. I love it enough that when it comes out in October, I will actually purchase it. This will be my first time to purchase a Windows platform, but I digress.
I decided to go ahead and install the newest version of Windows 7 (The Release Cantidate) on the PC before setting it all up.
The install took about 30 minutes with no propmts to me except “What’s your name, and what would you like to call your computer?” Windows 7 booted up for the first time, and here’s the list of things that blew me away
- My Wireless and Wired network cards both worked without me having to tweak a single thing (unlike Vista and the Beta of 7)
- The HDMI audio worked without any tweaking (also unlike Vista and Beta of 7)
- Every single video format I threw at Windows Media Center played without having to install a single codec. Dolby Digital worked without having to do anything.
- EVERYTHING JUST WORKED, which I’ve never had a computer (Mac or PC) do before.
I’ve set my little HTPC to be a media extender, which means if I hop on my xbox360 from anywhere in the house, I’ll have access to all the media that is on the computer, in the exact same interface as if I were on the computer.
Apparently Netflix streaming support has been added to Windows Media Center, and there’s already plugins to have it work sending out to the 360, which means it bypasses the problem of having to get an xbox live account (and pay roughly and extra $5 a month on top of your netflix subscription just so you can stream movies. This is all fairly amazing to me. We are on the cusp of the whole entertainment industry completely having to change to cater to a new market. A market that doesn’t want to put up with 1/3rd of their viewing time being taken up by commercials (yes, if you watch a 30 minute show with the commercials taken out of the show, you are left with roughly 20 minutes of programming).My next course of action is to setup a super low power media server with ~5 Terabytes of space so I don’t have to have on my main (power hog) computer 24/7.
Keep me posted on the low power server set up. I’m thinking about doing something similar.
I was considering installing Win 7 as well on a second partition on my main C: Drive… if I pop in the disc, will it kill my current C: Drive?
How does the xbox handle all the formats? Since it is MCE, does it convert things like 720p x264 mkv files so that the xbox360 can play them?
Are you guys even speaking English?
ironically, when i installed windows 7, it completely bonked my WMC connection, which had been working like a charm. i still haven’t gotten the xbox and my PC to talk to each other anymore.
XBMC rocks, thanks for the info.
Many thanks for the good tips. I was thinking in case you could possibly point me in direction of extra resources?.
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I’m pretty much impressed with the stability of Windows 7. It is better than windows Vista which hogs my memory and cpu.’`,
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where do you get downloadable movies online?-*:
great info ! i just know that .. Thanks ..
i always download movies from rapidshare, bittorrent and sometimes on video sharing sites.’*”