Media streaming for 360

[Pulsar_t]

I like how they implemented media playback in the 360 but still managed to botch it up by A) Not including dynamic compression, making speech volume exceedingly low compared to other audio elements B) restricting container compatibility e.g. MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid/Divx/MP4V) in MP4 doesn't work at all, nor does MP3 audio in MP4) C) No subtitles support whatsoever, and no Matroska support either.

So what I'm asking is this: What's the best app for streaming videos to the 360, and does it need more considerable CPU time than normal AV decoding would?

[lisalover1]

360mediaserver seems like a pretty good program for transcoding and streaming. Here's a link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/x360mediaserve/
I haven't used this program in partcular, but I use the PS3 equivalent, PS3mediaserver; it works very well, and is able to stream surprisingly high-quality video.

[Pulsar_t]

360mediaserver supports audio only according to the readme. Will have to try Vuze and judge the results myself.

[Niode]

I use PS3 Media server with my 360. But I can't play any videos or anything on it. I haven't tried to configure a way around it though. The 360 will play with Windows Media Player though, so if you have your library in WMP (Yuck, I'd never do this) you should be able to access it from your 360, using it as a 'Media Extender' as Microsoft likes to put it.

[CRTGAMER]

My nephew has his 360 streaming videos to the HD. Movies look great, however once in a while a pause of video while 360 hard drive or maybe wireless/ethernet burps. Only a sec or so but very irritating, give me a regular DVD any day.

Not to 360 though, but a more direct approach.
Maybe try an external hard drive full of your videos as a memory card, directly attached to USB of DVD player, no pauses what so ever.

[Pulsar_t]

Thank you everyone, but it seems the whole process isn't worth the trouble. Vuze insists on "transcoding" everything (transcoding is a misleading term, it might as well be re-encoding from scratch), and WMP11 only supports WMV (seriously, who has WMV movies?)

I would have been content with the 360's default playback features but since it lacks subtitle supports and DRC (essential if you want to watch during night-time, since there's no audio balance otherwise), it's too much to expect the 360 to be a replacement to $30 DVD players which contain much more functionality. SMSPlayer on the PS2 had way more features (minus MP4/AVC support). H.264 and Matroska support won't be found in cheap players any time soon however.

[Niode]

I just use my PS3 which works perfectly with PS3 Media Server. Thankfully I have a PC fast enough for transcoding so pretty much everything plays perfectly except for certain unusual codecs, but that's only reared it's ugly head once or twice.