The Xbox as a Streaming Media Platform - Part II

What a giant PITA I've had over the past few days trying to get this to work. If you don't have a Media Center PC (I don't), then you have to use Windows Media Player 11 to share your media with the Xbox 360. Although I setup media sharing in WMP11 and added the mapped drive of my NAS to the library, the 360 would not see it. WMP11 would see the media just fine but the 360 would only see the media on the PC's HD.

I then read that Winamp Remote was another solution to stream to the 360. I downloaded,installed, added my NAS and FINALLY I was able to see my music. BUT Winamp Remote didn't support viewing my pictures on the 360 and that was one of the reasons to do all this.

A third option presented itself, Orb. Apparently Winamp Remote uses orb so I had to uninstall that first before I could install Orb. It was a very clean install and the config was simple and FINALLY I could view my music AND pictures! THANK FSM!!!

The number one reason to do all this was to provide my wife with a library of her DVDs to stream to the 360 and while I was trying to get the music and pictures to stream to the 360, I've been trying to get a digital copy of a DVD in DivX format so I could copy it to the NAS and stream it to the 360.

Holy crap has this been a frustrating exercise. After 2 days of reseach and experimentation, I appear to be 90% done. First I have to run DVD Decrpyt and then DVD Shrink (in NFO mode) and finally I'm using AutoGK to convert to DivX. Nothing is ever easy as AutoGK would run for 50 minutes and fail with an 'unable to open AVI' error. More reseach and a few more failed 50 minute runs later and I've cracked the 50 minute mark, it's at 90 minutes and still chugging. I was hoping to get an AVI and copy it to the NAS and test it on the 360 before I went to bed but it appears not to be. Hopefully a perfectly working AVI will be waiting for me in the morning....