Yesterday I decided to mess with the streaming media option on my 360 and I must say I'm impressed. I put Windows media player 11 on the desktop/server I'm running in my basement, told the library where to find my folder of mp3's and my folder of photos and poof! The xbox found it right away. The visualizations are pretty cool on the TV too.

I did hose it up once when I tried to stop a song half way done playing. I wound up rebooting the server computer and then I had to go through the whole media player 11 library share again. Everything worked fine after that though.

I do have some questions, does anyone know about the library update in media player? That is, if I were to create a new folder in my "music" folder which the media player library is linked to, would it automatically update the library or do I need to do something to update it.

Also, does media player have to be running for the xbox to connect? I never closed the media player prog once I got it running, I'm just wondering if the server reboots and media player doesn't run, will the streaming not work.

Last, I assume that when I'm in say Halo 3 and go into the xbox mini-dashboard that the "select music" option will let me listen to music while I'm playing a game?

I could never get it to work

I got it to work but see no point in it as I can just play songs off of iTunes with the XBOX's music turned down

Too bad this isn't about the original Xbox. Two of which I have streaming from a dedicated server. XBMC > All.

I stream. It was super easy with WMP 11, and with Windows Media Center, it was easy too.

Anytime I add new music to a shared folder on the PC - it's selectable by the 360.
And yes - by selecting the play music option, you play music over any game soundtrack. Except for some cutscenes where they'll pause playback, then resume once it's over.

It's easy on the 360; I love playing my library with some of my games; MUA really gets old with the same heroic theme playing in the background all the time. On the PS3, it never works right (but the photo display is wicked sweet at least).

But by using custom soundtracks in game, you can still hear the sound effects and other audio cues.

But isn't that YMMV depending on the game? Some games let you hear cues while playing your own music and some will only play your audio and the cues and dialog are overridden.

I stream too, but now I have a 250GB drive attached to it. I periodically refresh that drive and am currently in the process of converted my DVDs to hi-res wmv files and placing them on the drive. My goal is for the 360 to be a multimedia jukebox.

Take a look at TVersity if you want to stream things besides mp3s and WMVs. It transcodes divx on the fly.

I love streaming music and video from my Vista Ultimate box to my 360. Isn't there some additional video codec support (XVID?) coming in the fall update?

I would doubt it, most likely want to keep it entirely proprietary with the WMV. But like I said TVersity does divx, xvid, and others easily.

ALL games let you hear cues and dialog.

Room with computer ≠ Room with Xbox

Hmmm, ok. It seems to me I tried this with one game and some important audio from the game was not playing while I played music from a Thumb Drive on the 360. Maybe I did something wrong.

Streaming on the xbox = awesome feature.

Yeah, the 360's streaming and media center capabilities are great...if you haven't used XBMC. It felt a little stilted compared to what I can do with my orig xbox running XBMC.

Thanks for all the replies.

One other question...


Is there a standard for labeling the mp3's?

I have a lot of mp3's, many that I have ripped using WMP and many that I have downloaded over the years...and it wasn't itunes <cough><cough>.

Anyway, in the WMP library or in xbox media center (doesn't matter which), it's kinda "messy" looking. I thought my collection was pretty neat as it appeared on my drive, but then when WMP looks at all the albums and artists and sorts it all, I have songs from one album and not another, etc. Any recommedations on "cleaning it up." As for future ones, all the stuff I ripped using WMP seems nice and organized.

Thanks and BTW, It IS awesome, love using it to show slideshows of photos to folks instead of connecting the camera to the tv or making a cd/dvd.

I use it all the time to show photos to guests. Whenever we mention something that we have done and we are asked if we have pictures, I just turn on the XBOX 360 and find the appropriate file folder. It always amazes everybody the first time.

I find it very slow to respond whenever I used my 360s Windows Media Center features.