The Fall Update
Published by runtime 360 October 30th, 2006 in Blog |
I’m of course referring to Microsoft’s latest dashboard update (and not this long overdue post!). Those of us hoping for a wider range of video formats will have been disappointed to find that the streaming media enhancements on offer are limited to WMV over Windows Media Player 11 and Windows Media Connect. |
| I should point out that non-MCE computers will not be able to take advantage of transcoding solutions (including T360) until developers can figure out how to ‘plug-in’ to Windows Media Player 11 and/or Windows Media Connect. Though if Microsoft is using a standards based UPNP implementation (which I believe it has with respect to music and photos), then I would expect someone to knock up a transcoding solution not too far down the line - that someone though, is unlikely to be me. | |
| You’ll have noticed that since Beta 4 I’ve been updating the site less frequently. While I’m keen on my 360 and software development in general, my priorities have changed with the happy discovery that I’m going to be a Dad very shortly! I will no doubt still find the time to dabble/tinker about with XNA and Media Center stuff in general, but likely not to the same extent I could in my XBMC hay day. |
|
| So what of T360, My Movies and Vista? In the run up to Xmas I’ll be tidying up the code, versioning (releasing a 1.0 final build) and updating the publically accessible subversion source code repo here. I’m definately open to offers of help managing the forums, and if there are any keen C# developers out there I would consider handing over the reins (I’d need to evaluate a patch/diff submission to get an idea of apptitude etc.). |
|
| There is finally a beta build available on the My Movies website (forums) which can be evaluated. My Movies does not include T360, you need to install both. When My Movies is running over an Extender (e.g. 360) it will detect that T360 is installed and offer you the option to stream the movie from within the My Movies interface. |
|
| A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to replace my production Media Center 2005 build with Vista with the view of doing some T360 development/testing. Unfortunately I encountered a number of hardware compatibility issues with my setup which meant that I had to revert to MCE2005. I’m still very keen to put together an easy to install Vista-friendly build, and with some help from the forum regulars I plan to get this done around the same time as 1.0 (i.e. before the end of year - OK I hope to get it done a lot sooner, but I’m giving myself plenty of slack!). |
|
| In winding down the project, I want to thank all of you guys for your support over the past months, its been fun working on this project and I’m thrilled that its been a help to so many folks. If past experience is anything to go by, it won’t be too long before I get the itch to cut some code and spin up another project, I just need to find the elusive secret to balancing work, family life and homebrew; if anyone has any insights please let me know!! |
|
Congratulations on the news! If you’re going to give an excuse for not spending as much time with games then there aren’t many better than that
With this dash update what I really need is some way to transcode and stream video from my Mac. Connect360 does that perfectly with my iTunes and iPhoto libraries and I hope that the functionality will be extended to videos in the near future. In the meantime I’ll have to hope that my dad’s ancient XP machine can handle the task of streaming 720p video over the network.
Thanks! Always great to hear from you. Now, if you see me playing Viva Pinata you now know why. The shame of it!! Come to think of it, theres not a heck of a lot of ‘kid’ friendly games on the 360, might have to get a Wii after all!
I’m not sure what the story is with the Mac re: WMV conversion, but Connect360 takes advantage of the fact that Windows Media Connect is a UPNP server. If Microsoft have done things properly they will have extended that to support WMV file streaming, if thats the case then its not a huge leap for someone to take something like VLC port it across to the Mac and integrate it into Connect360 or an open source UPNP server. I’m quietly confident that it’ll happen sooner rather than later.
Hey Runtime, congratulation! Being a father is a great thing (I have 3 kids myself). It will take you a good 6 months post delivery to get back a life
On the XP to 360 streaming front it work a treat! As fas as MAC goes a port of WMA encoder will have to be done. The 360 won’t play anything that has something else than a WMA audio in it. Right now I don’t think MAC can encode to WMA audio.
Flip4Mac does a plugin for Quicktime on the Mac which allows it to play back and encode WMV and WMA files, so it’s been done in a commercial application at least. Microsoft even subsidises their playback component in lieu of updating the dreadful Windows Media Player for Mac.
I’ve been in touch with Nullriver and they confirmed that Connect360 will be implementing video streaming in the future. Even if it only streams videos that are already native WMV that’ll be OK with me (this iBook is never going to be able to transcode video in real-time, to be fair) but some of their other applications allow encoding from WMV, so I’m sure they can manage something.
Congrads on the family runtime. Someone’s really gotta come up with a plugin for WMP 11 for this. It works great connecting my XP pc and 360, but the only thing it’s missing is Divx/xvid! Pretty please?
Hello runtime. I am trying to get access to the source code that you pointed to. I could not manage to log in as anonymous and wondered if you had any more details. I’m a C# developer who is interested in seeing how things are done and to re-compile to .net 2.
For those who care, Connect360 now supports streaming of WMV files to the 360 from the Mac. I’d assume transcoding just isn’t realistic at the moment when the best solution for playing them is a third party one, but I’ll take this quite happily. The HD samples from the WMV HD page look beautiful.
Now can we expand the functionality to support more than just WMV please, Microsoft? Even if DivX and XviD are on dodgy ground why not go for H.264 and basic MPEG-4?