Streaming Video From A Mac Via Xbox360

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting some form of media server solution setup for quite some time. I had initially been interested in setting up some way of streaming all my audio CDs, but more recently I was interested in doing something similar with AVIs and DivX.

I don’t use Windows that much and I currently don’t have a functioning desktop PC at home (hard drive death).

So that leaves me with my MacBook Pro and an Xbox360, which I got a few months ago from Microsoft Ireland.

The Xbox does have support for video and audio, but the problem is getting the files onto it or to it..

Fortunately there are solutions available.

Connect360, which costs $20, is a simple, yet powerful, bit of software that can help turn your Apple Mac into a media source for your Xbox.

Download the installer, run it and then tweak the settings a small bit and off you go.
I currently don’t have iPhoto installed, but it recognised both the Xbox and the various multimedia files on the hard drive of the Mac.

The only other setting that I tweaked was the location and scan frequency for “movies”:

The one possible downside is that the Xbox itself will display absolutely all the directories and subdirectories of the source, so you could end up doing quite a bit of scrolling to find the file you want to watch.

In terms of supported formats, the Xbox seems to support most of the common ones that you’re likely to encounter, though some AVI files I threw at it wouldn’t open.
Passing them through Avidemux seemed to resolve a lot of the problems.

Of course, if you can’t view the file using something like VLC on your Mac, then trying to get the Xbox to open it is probably futile.

The Xbox’s user interface for playing AVIs etc., is reasonably intuitive and includes basic play, pause, fast forward controls.

Being able to watch various video formats on a decent sized screen with the audio going through my AV receiver is a significant improvement over trying to watch them on a 15″ laptop screen with “tinny” audio.

There are, of course, other ways of doing this.

In terms of commercial software there is also a package called Rivet, which retails for slightly less than Connect360. According to this review Rivet has better structuring in terms of the navigation of files on your Mac.

I also came across a “free” way of doing streaming, but haven’t had a chance to try it out.