INANE has been helping to answer a LOT of my HTPC questions, but I have a few that center around the use of a HTPC (Or really, Windows Media Center Edition) and a XBox 360 as a Media Center Extender.
Basically, I am trying to find out if I get a HTPC, but (trying to add value to this proposed project since my wife uses our home PC a lot) replace our home PC (which is pretty kick butt, but not enough for what I want in a HTPC), and then use the XBox 360 actually in the home theater room for MP3, DVD, and TV. I know that it can be done, that isn't the question.
My question is if I record HDTV on the HTPC, will the XBox 360 play it back on my projector at 720p or 1080i, or does it just send it to the XBox as 480p or something?
I want HDTV in my home theater, so that is one of the big reasons to build a HTPC, but I think that if I could house the HTPC somewhere else in the house where it will get more use, I will have a better time "selling it" to my wife.
Thanks to oldskoolboarder, I've already got my wife liking HDTV on the projector, but the first question she asked me after watching one of "her" shows for 5 minutes was, "Can I record this?" So she is slowly being convinced.
I know that there are a lot of potential issues with a HTPC being used for "regular" things, such as the drives filling up with garbage programs and such, but I will work through that thought path on my own.
So, does anyone know if I can stream video to a XBox 360 and play it back in HD?
I have a PC down in my office running Vista and an Xbox 360 extender in the media room. What I don't have is HD of any kind on that setup, so I can't answer your question directly. There's a lot of complaining that the extenders don't support some of the more popular codecs such as DivX, XviD, etc. For HD recording, I'm guessing good codecs such as those are a must, lest your TV shows take up 50Gb each.
There's quite a bit of information about HD on Vista Media Center and an equal amount of complaining. In all the material I've read, I've not read about someone using an extender to watch recorded HDTV, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Some people are having good luck with a product called HDHomerun (I think) and Media Center, but again, no mention of extenders. I was going to try it out but, lucky me, my cable company took all of their unencrypted HD channels off the air this past weekend. It's OTA for me or $$$ and another box in my AV Rack.
I'll be interested in seeing what other people say. I am virtually in the same situation as you at this point.
I just came across a program called Transcode 360. Free application to run on MCE 2005 or now Vista and will take a bunch of encoding formats and stream them to an XBox 360.
I will have to look more into this, but it should allow the recording of TV and movies (if you wanted) to the HTPC in a higher compression format like Divx and Xvid, and yet re-encode them in what they claim is "faster than real-time" for direct streaming to the XBox 360. Hmmm....
Transcode 360
Now, I DO have some experience with that. It seems to work well, but it's not as seamless as I would like (and my wife would like). You have to pick the movie, pull up the "more info..." menu, select transcode, wait about 30 seconds and your movie is playing. With the slowness of Vista Media Center, plus the added slowness of the extender, I'm not a huge fan. But then again, I don't really have any DivX or XviD encoded stuff to speak of.
I record in HD and find that each 1hr show takes up approx. 8.2GB.
I don't have an XBox 360, nor do I stream any content, but I have a couple of search results for the Xbox 360 on sites that have great resources:
Home Theater PC News is a great site that really helped me with my HTPC build.
AVS HTPC Forum has a ton as well.
Here's a new article from PC Magazine about the new
Dell XPS 410 that will allow you to use a cable card for recording HD off of your
cable's system feed . It's only going to be available to major manufacturers, not the DIY crowd for a while, but it's still a promising step in the right direction.
Well I had just fired off my long winded pros/cons of this so maybe post it here for the class to learn from too.
BTW on those cablecard ready HTPC's, be warned... most cable companies are moving to "switched video" in order to bring more HD/digital TV in a cheaper (for them) manor. CableCard 1.0 does NOT work with it. So all these new Tivo3's and HTPC's will be S.O.L. because they won't work with CableCard 2.0 (if it ever actually comes out).
Does anyone have the HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360? If so, is regular DVD playback better on the HD-DVD drive than it is with the built in DVD drive (since I've heard that the built in one is terrible)????
I think it's exactly the same.... Just to be sure, I put the same disc in both drives, and I can't tell a difference. And yeah, the DVD playback isn't that great. It's decent, but of course I'd rather watch on my Toshiba HD DVD player.
When I want to watch a DVD, I turn off my Xbox and I turn to my Oppo 981. Can't beat the price or the picture, really.
I agree that there are better players out there, but I was hoping to eliminate my Panasonic S97 with the whole HTPC thing/XBox 360 combo.
Maybe a HTPC in the home theater (should beat any stand alone DVD player), and then a TV out card on the PC I am typing on right now? Then, if I had file sharing on, in theory, I could play the file off of the HTPC through this PC to our standard def TV in this room.
What if I had Media Center Edition 2005 running on this PC and Vista running on the new HTPC. Could they "talk" to each other and share kind of like having a Media Center Extender?
I'm just trying to maximize my features, and my wife LOVES DVR, so by getting DVR in the home theater, that is a plus, but if I can "displace" (or replace) the Dish DVR in this room, I could reroute the Dish DVR to our kitchen TV where she has been wanting it for years. Then all of our TVs, AND the home theater, would have DVR and not just 2 TVs...
Of course, that would mean no XBox 360 for games, but that is OK, I guess...
Thoughts? Ideas?
The MCE community has been asking for a client/server peice for a long time. There are some hacks you can try to have the MCE PC without the tuners look to the other box to play back what it recorded. Also to have one machine save it's recorded TV to a network share. None of it is optimal and I can't speak to how well it works because I haven't tried.
My friend tells me his 360 looks good enough while playing DVDs, he says the only time he can tell the difference is it he pauses it and compares, and nobody watches DVD's paused ;-)
But if you put the HTPC in your HT room, just get a 360 for the other room? Is DVD playback as critical in this other room? You'd be able to do all the TV recording on the HTPC and play it back in both locations.
Oh and any XP SP2 machine can playback the recorded TV of a MCE box. The only exception is the new cablecard HTPC's which isn't being considered here I believe.