sector 42

(This was intended to be a follow up to Network Attached Storage for the Home)

After doing a fair amount of researching it seems that I was a bit optimistic to expect a relatively simple procedure.

Microsoft’s strategy looks to be that despite having a 360, a PC is still the digital hub of the home, since the 360 uses the WMC protocol (yawn) to talk to a Windows PC with the necessary stub software installed, this PC containing all the content. One would think that the 360 would be able to connect to the NAS directly, using SMB, but that is not an option unfortunately. And even if it was, the 360 supports very little in the way of codecs out of the box, necessitating some kind of transcoding proxy sitting between it and any Xvid encoded content.

There is an application called Connect 360 which lets you do some measure of sharing to the XBox, but its fatal flaw is that it requires an OSX system to run, and assumes all your media is in iPhoto/iTunes.

The whole point of my buying a NAS was so that I wouldn’t have to have a PC running to access my content in the first place, and could just stream my media to the XBox directly off it.

A German company called TwonkyVision has implemented a product with the same name, which sounds like it would do the necessary work. At first glance, it looked like the ideal solution, since they created a version that could be installed directly on my NAS. After installing it, I had some reason to hope, because the 360 was able to detect it, and I was also able to browse the directory structure on the NAS from the 360.

However, I ran into some issues:

• Only pictures and audio actually showed up as content on the 360, none of my Xvid encoded movies did (some MP4 content did, but unplayable, see below).
• I am not sure that transcoding actually works in TwonkyVision – I tried to play the MP4 video content that showed up, and I either got a strange codec-like error message, or I nothing happened when I pressed play.

Not very promising – I was hoping the 360 would be a nice option for playing some HD content, but it looks like I am stuck with the XBox first generation and XBMC for my home content needs, though the hardware is starting to feel a bit long in the tooth. If XBMC could run on the 360, and run well (without breaking Xbox Live), I wouldn’t even be posting this, XBMC‘s media navigation and metadata features blow the 360 out of the water, you simply can’t beat community for adding features people actually want, it seems.