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Xbox 360 and the streaming of videos
Woggle
OheoRegistered User regular
OheoRegistered User regular
So I have my xbox set up in the basement with a rather comfortable hammock in front of the TV, and I'd like to be able to stream my collection of dvds from my computer upstairs.
There's no place to put the dvds next to the TV, and getting a bookshelf there would require carting it down 2 flights of stairs and around some very tight corners. The seemingly simpler solution is to rip the dvds I want to watch onto my computer and stream them over the lan to the xbox.
So far I have the xbox and computer connected with windows media center, and I can play the sample videos and music from the windows media player library just fine. The problem is media center doesn't seem to like streaming a dvd that's in the drive, so I doubt that a mounted ISO would work.
My next thought was to convert the movie into a file it will play. This page lists the details of the file types the xbox can play: avi, H.264, mpeg-4, and wmv. I've ripped a dvd to an ISO with dvd decrypter, and after some scrounging around online I found Handbrake, a newbie-friendly encoder that seemed to do what I needed.
I used the xbox 360 settings preset, which set the video type to H.264, pointed it at the ISO, and started it off encoding.
The result? Windows media player doesn't like the file. I added the folder it's in to the library, but wmp doesn't recognize it when it searches for new files, and it doesn't show up on the xbox when I go into the media center. When I try to open it with wmp, it pops up with a warning saying "wmp doesn't recognize the mpeg-4 file type, but do you want try to play it anyway?" with a y/n prompt. If I click yes it spits out this error message: Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.
So I'm stuck. The other 2 video encoder options in handbrake are xvid and mpeg4, neither of which help due to the xbox not playing xvid and wmp apparently not able to use mpeg4 files. I tried to find another encoder that could do avi or wmv, but my google-fu fails me as I know next to nothing about a/v formats and jargon.
tl'dr: How do I make windows media player 11 recognize H.264 encoded .mp4 files? If that won't work, how else can I get my computer to stream dvds to the 360?
There's no place to put the dvds next to the TV, and getting a bookshelf there would require carting it down 2 flights of stairs and around some very tight corners. The seemingly simpler solution is to rip the dvds I want to watch onto my computer and stream them over the lan to the xbox.
So far I have the xbox and computer connected with windows media center, and I can play the sample videos and music from the windows media player library just fine. The problem is media center doesn't seem to like streaming a dvd that's in the drive, so I doubt that a mounted ISO would work.
My next thought was to convert the movie into a file it will play. This page lists the details of the file types the xbox can play: avi, H.264, mpeg-4, and wmv. I've ripped a dvd to an ISO with dvd decrypter, and after some scrounging around online I found Handbrake, a newbie-friendly encoder that seemed to do what I needed.
I used the xbox 360 settings preset, which set the video type to H.264, pointed it at the ISO, and started it off encoding.
The result? Windows media player doesn't like the file. I added the folder it's in to the library, but wmp doesn't recognize it when it searches for new files, and it doesn't show up on the xbox when I go into the media center. When I try to open it with wmp, it pops up with a warning saying "wmp doesn't recognize the mpeg-4 file type, but do you want try to play it anyway?" with a y/n prompt. If I click yes it spits out this error message: Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.
So I'm stuck. The other 2 video encoder options in handbrake are xvid and mpeg4, neither of which help due to the xbox not playing xvid and wmp apparently not able to use mpeg4 files. I tried to find another encoder that could do avi or wmv, but my google-fu fails me as I know next to nothing about a/v formats and jargon.
tl'dr: How do I make windows media player 11 recognize H.264 encoded .mp4 files? If that won't work, how else can I get my computer to stream dvds to the 360?
Woggle on
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I'm an almost complete newbie with audio visual stuffs. I looked for guides to help my understanding, but any I found either were magical 'Do this, that and presto!' guides that didn't explain much, or explained advanced concepts that assumed you already knew the basics.
It would be great if anyone could point me to a good resource to learn about this. All my attempts to find guides with the terms I know either spit out generic blog or forum posts, or stuff only slightly related to what I wanted.
They're generally very detailed, and have multiple entry levels from memory.
But yes, to reiterate, the 360 can stream xvid from your PC directly (or even if you put it on USB and stick it in the 360).
If you can convert the DVDs using whatever tools you are using to an xvid file with mp3 soundtrack that you can play in WMP, you should be golden.
As a side question, why wouldn't you just pick out the DVD you want to watch and carry it with you downstairs and put it in the Xbox, which plays DVDs? That seems like ultimately the easier solution.
This, of course, goes out the window if you have a full library of stuff in esoteric formats.