I’m going to take a quick break from film editing (well, I’m actually neck deep in After Effects doing titles, Rick and Woody are editing) to tell you about a neat little application we came across that lets you play video from your Mac on the Xbox360.
It’s called Connect360 and it basically lets you watch vide, look at photos and listen to music on your 360 via ethernet cable. It’s real handy for watching quick edits of the film, but we also use it to watch downloaded TV shows (you’ll need to update the Xbox to watch anything encoded in DivX). It’s nowhere near as good as XBMC for the old Xbox (and now PC, Mac and Linux), but it does play high-def H.264 (but only if the bit rate is below 12mbps) so that’s handy for us. There is another peace of software out called Rivet which is supposedly better (and cheaper) but I haven’t tried it yet.
I don’t buy into the whole PC Vs. Apple thing (because PC is clearly better) but we did try doing it the Microsoft way using Windows Media Player 11 on a PC running XP SP2, but it wouldn’t ever see any media (not even MP3s). And I hate to admit it, but Connect360 and the Mac worked straight out of the box.
If you know of a better way, I’d like to hear it. I’ve used MediaPortal, AppleTV (I have a brand new one for sale if you want it) and XBMC so far, and I think XBMC is clearly the best (but can’t play HD unlike the other two).
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Hey Drew,
Did you look at modding the Apple TV? I know the mod for Atv ver 1 was fairly straight forward, not sure about the newer gen though.
Maybe popmag.com,au cold start it’s own engadget style section??? i’m al for it!
if you have a macbook it works wirelessly if the xbox360 is connected to your router also. i’ve been using it for months. its pretty good
Pffft. PC’s. I noticed one of your edit suites was a PC, and frankly, I felt a little bit sick.
there is nothing worse than tools that think macs are sooooooooooooo much better than pc’s
but they rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Ok… Geek out.
My first real computer was an old Power Mac. Then I went to school and we mainly used PC. Then I went to high school and it was all PC. I became a computer technician after high school to help pay for snowboarding (and use the skills I’d learnt from hacking my schools Novell Netware). This was all on PC’s.
For a while there it was so hard to find cracked software for Mac’s. I also play too many games to completely ditch PC’s. I even installed a ‘hackintosh’ version of Tiger on my intel based PC (just to see if it’d work). The only reason I now use a Mac is for Final Cut. I just hate the fact that I can’t crack open my Mac and install a new GPU, otherwise I’d probably switch for good. I haven’t played around with Bootcamp too much because I’ve got a kick-arse gaming rig PC. Until that finally becomes out-dated I won’t bother trying to get my Mac to run a new GPU.
So I’m happy to exist in a MAC/PC middle ground. Frankly, I like being able to learn both operating systems together. Mac’s are pain in the arse to network (the SharePoints prefPane makes it easier), there are still a few companies that don’t make drivers for OSX, Mac gaming sucks, freeware is almost nonexistent on Mac and the majority of Mac uses don’t understand the basics of computing (ie no, you can’t just delete a program from the applications folder, have you ever looked in the Library folder?).
On the other hand, Vista is a POS, Microsoft can’t make a good native program outside of Office, what the fuck is with Genuine Advantage and can they please just give up on IE.
That’s all I can be bothered with right now. Basically, Mac=Final Cut, PC=Games.
Rick.
yeah but macs just look cooler and for a wannabe hipster such as myself thats all that matters