Streaming content from HDD to Xbox 360

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mr_norris

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Hey,

I had trouble streaming content from my laptop with Windows 8 installed. Some MS articles pointed me towards purchasing Windows Media Centre, which of course, I wasn't too keen on.

I googled a bit and found this, which worked:

1. Move mouse to the right corner
2. Click Settings
3. Click Change PC Settings
4. Click HomeGroup
5. If you have not already done so create a HomeGroup
6. Under Media Devices turn on "Allow all devices on the network such as TVs and game consoles to play my shared content"
7. Place your audio and video files into your Windows 8 Libraries
8. On your Xbox using the music or video player select your PC and browse to your files :)

That works pretty well.

Lately though, I've had space issues with my laptop. So I moved everything to my beast of a desktop. Even that has it's limits though. So I figured I could try something else.

Instead of running a PC, which would use unnecessary electricity, I could plug in an external into the USB port on my router and setup sharing.

Unfortunately, it's not the sharing I had in mind. While it's handy for storage and "streaming" to a PC, the Xbox doesn't pick up the share, nor does it allow me to enter a location.

I was quite sad - I cannot for the life of me come up with a cost effective solution. It seems that I have to buy something else to achieve this. Plugging an external directly into the Xbox won't work either.

So the solutions which I could come up with are:

- Getting a router which supports UPnP AV Media streaming. I'm not too keen on that because it sounds pricey, and well, I have a working router.

- Getting a WD Live Media player

To me that's fail because:
a) I'm spending more
b) I was hoping to use my Xbox as a media player.

- Getting one of those Wireless External Hard drives. The price really puts me off though.

I also thought of going the Raspberry Pi route, but the costs might quickly jump up enough to swing me towards the WD Live.

Any suggestions?
 
Thanks, but prices start at $149. That's already ~R500 more than the WD.

Either way I have to buy drives. I was hoping to just come to some sort of solution where my Xbox could magically see them :P
 
I normally streamed video directly from my desktop to the TV via HDMI cable.

When my HDMI port on my graphics card decided to die, I had to make a plan other than resort to watching my videos on my 19" desktop screen (as opposed to the nice 42" LED in the living room).

I fiddled a bit with the XBox Media Center App, but finally got it to work.

I did find that it had trouble indexing my entire video collection, so I only shared one folder, and I just drop whatever I want to watch into that folder.

Works for the moment, until I can get a new graphics card. Then it's back to HDMI input and the Unified Remote Android App. :p
 
Snoopimaru said:
I fiddled a bit with the XBox Media Center App, but finally got it to work.
:p
Click to expand...

There are two problems with that (that I found).

- With Windows 8 Pro, you have to buy Media Center, it doesn't come with Windows like it did with Windows 7 :/
- I found that streaming using Media Center had some sort of on the fly transcoding going on. The quality of the video was much less. Very strange.

My solution is borrowing a Popbox V8 from a friend, and buying an external to plug in.

Still curious to see what others do though :)
 
well if you have a Smart TV or something similar you don't have to worry about how to share devices etc. With the Smart TV option you can either plug the drive directly into the TV itself and play from there. Or setup AllShare on the PC and stream from the PC.

If price wasn't an issue, I would say buy one of those HP Micro Servers (last time I checked they were in the R 1,300 region). They use hardly any power and you can use them to stream and as a NAS.

But Xbox is a pain when streaming... I have one and its a pain with codecs and MKV files etc. If you can, rather find another way to stream and bypass the console. And the only effective way of getting your Xbox to recognise the drive is to Customize it first using the Xbox under System Preferences. It uses a different file system than that of NTFS. There are ways of getting around that.. But.. It's "frowned upon"....
 
What you can do is get yourself a copy of TVersity. you can find it here and its free. I'm currently using it at home and never had an issue with it once.
 
The way I understand it, you can stream directly from a hdd with the correct media updates for xbox.
The same way you can use a flashdrive as a hdd on xbox.
 
Correct... how ever the xbox cannot play MKV. I think only AVI and MP4.... i could be wrong. Thats why i use that TVersity APP and stream it from my pc
 
AAh, mkv isn't as popular as before.
I generally get most things in either mp4 or avi now anyway.
 
I would still recommend a WD player, but if cash is the issue and you would like to work with what you have, get TVersity
 
I'd say get an external HDD and use Serviio. Based on the video below it couldn't be easier.

[video=youtube;eBdCb1OdlKc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBdCb1OdlKc[/video]
 
Thanks, but I'd have to use my desktop for that, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Instead I'll go the media player route :D
 
I found quite an economical solution.

- I bought a 2TB Seagate External Drive from Incredible Connection. They're on special for R999 (if you can find a branch with stock). I'm keeping all my media there.

That free's up space on my laptop and desktop, and of course releases me of the need for them to be on when watching stuff :D

- A good friend of mine is letting me use his unused Popbox V8 media player. Apparently they're pretty boss, and I can install an app on my phone to control it with.

I can either plug the external directly into the Popbox, or access my media if the drive is plugged into my router (apparently the Popbox supports that sort of filesharing method - I just forget the name).

Once it's all setup, I'll report back.

Otherwise, I can't really call this streaming from HDD to Xbox 360 anymore :P
 
Why not install Plex on your laptop, enable DLNA and point your XBOX to the Plex server. That way you will be able to watch MKV because Plex will transcode the video to play on your XBOX.
 
Jalaloedien said:
Why not install Plex on your laptop, enable DLNA and point your XBOX to the Plex server. That way you will be able to watch MKV because Plex will transcode the video to play on your XBOX.
Click to expand...

I was trying to find a solution which didn't involve having a PC / Laptop on.

Anyway, just thought I'd give those of you who have a D-link 2750U router a warning. I plugged my external into the USB port and enabled the storage service.

After setting up user access, I noticed it created a folder on the drive, so I moved everything I had (movies, series, steam backups, saved game files) to said folder.

After experimenting, I decided it was a pretty horrible setup. Like most people on the interwebs confirmed, copying to and from the drive was SLOW.

So I decided it was time to put things as they were, and disabled the storage service after removing the user I'd initially created.

Fast forward to last night, I plug my external back in and discover a completely empty drive. Once my heart started beating again, I realised that my router nuked the folder when I'd deleted the network user I'd created. Epic FAIL.

Save your data, don't do what I did! Stay away from the storage service!
 
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