Getting a 360 for Media Center Extender


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Soon I'm not going to have dedicated media center pc but I really don't feel the need to replace it as I barely use most of it's features. Therefore, I need a media streamer of some kind and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go for a media center extender and the 360 seems to be by far the best value option.

I was just wondering if I should spend an extra ?35 to get the pro with 60GB hard drive. Can I copy video files to the hard disk that I download from the internet or not?

Thanks, mad_onion:))

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I would go with the Core to start you can always upgrade to a hard drive and get 3 months of Live, a headset, and an ethernet cable for the $100 price difference (guessing its similarly priced in the UK)

As for copying media to the hard drive I'm not sure its possible but I've never dived too deep into the options for working with files on external storage. If you're just interested in the video playback features you may want to look at the PS3 instead, its a bigger investment but you get Blu-ray, DIVX 3 playback, the ability to copy files to the hard drive, and a user-upgradable hard drive.

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I was looking at getting a 360 a while ago and decided they were too load and consumed too much power. I think the X360 is 90W when idle IIRC and a normal extender is nearer to 5W. Just something to bare in mind.

I went with a X280N personally, not as good value for money though if you dont mind the power/noise

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The Media Centre extender features on the Xbox Require a PC with Windows Media Centre so I presume you have another PC with media centre? If not Tversity will stream and convert a lot of file formats on the fly to the 360.

If you?re going to be playing games on the 360 the hard drive is a must, the bigger the better. If not then you have no use for it, you cannot store your own videos on it.

Something else to consider is do you want to play HD content on your tv? If not then a modded Xbox running Xbox Media Centre would be perfect for you. XBMC will even play your DVR-MS tv recordings from Windows Media Centre. If you?re wanting to play HD stuff then the Xbox 1 isn?t powerful enough, its an amazingly cheap solution to playback just about anything that?s not HD on your TV.

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i'm a pretty big fan of media center and at one point was looking for an extender to use in the bedroom. around 6 months ago i found the xbox core/arcade on sale for $169cdn. at that kind of price, with media center and all the other things you can use the 360 for i thought it would be great. but after a week or so it drove me nuts. its quite loud, big and uses a lot of power for something i just need for streaming/mce. i really wanted to use something like a linksys dma2100 but it seems like it doesnt have proper divx/xvid support and the reviews werent all that great.

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Thanks for all your help, after thinking about it it would be a shame to not be able to connect to xbox live so I think I should have a hard disk if it only is the 20GB version. I want to make sure I have the newest version of the xbox interface and the divx decoding so being able to update it is important.

Also, can I use media center extender with a wired or wireless connection?

Edited by mad_onion
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Thanks for all your help, after thinking about it it would be a shame to not be able to connect to xbox live so I think I should have a hard disk if it only is the 20GB version.

Does anyone know if you need to actually have media center RUNNING on the pc that is streaming for it to work or does it do it in the background?

Also, can I use media center extender with a wired or wireless connection?

No, you don't need to have it running, a service will run in the background.

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Keep in mind that Xbox 360's extender can't play any DVDs (at least I couldn't find a way :blush: ). Also it would be a good idea to put Windows 7 on your MC PC as 360's Vista MCE doesn't support Xvid/divx/h264.

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Keep in mind that Xbox 360's extender can't play any DVDs (at least I couldn't find a way :blush: ). Also it would be a good idea to put Windows 7 on your MC PC as 360's Vista MCE doesn't support Xvid/divx/h264.

ah ok great. i was planning to use windows 7 but i was unsure about divx support it's good to know that it will work as long as i use windows 7.

thanks a lot :)

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