Brian's Brain

An Xbox 360 has inhabited Chez Dipert for just under a year now, and it's been quite a harmonious affair so far. Admittedly, I don't have the time and attention span (along with, probably, the aptitude) to master the complex titles (and their equally-complex controller button sequences) now available for the console. But both my wife and I have greatly enjoyed the simpler (and cheaper) Live Arcade titles; she's found Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved to be disturbingly addictive, for example, while last night I was equally disturbed by how well I remembered the minutia of Doom from 10 years back (along with how significantly my Defender and Galaga skills have degraded since I last played them....oh....25 or so years ago).

We're equally enthralled with the console's multimedia capabilities. Lil's enthusiasm for techie tricks, shall we say, is not the match of her mate's. But once I showed her how to fire up Windows Media Connect on her XP Pro-powered laptop and access its stored pictures and music tracks (including Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription content), she's taken to it like a fish in water. Courtesy of the TwonkyMedia addin, I'm also able to access content stored on my Infrant ReadyNAS (neither the ReadyNAS's built-in UPnP capabilities nor those of my Buffalo TeraStation seem to be Xbox 360-cogniscent).

I've got two primary 'beefs' with the console's multimedia faculties, the first one minor and the second more significant (and, I'm happy to report, well on the way to being solved). I tend to shoot most of my Pentax DSLR images in RAW format, not JPEG. I wish there was a plug-in that enabled the Xbox 360 to directly decode PEFs, so that I didn't need to clutter my NAS with redundant batch-created JPG versions. Also, until recently the Xbox 360 was only able to stream video originating on Windows XP Media Center Edition-fueled PCs; conventional XP clients (via Windows Media Connect) and other UPnP storage devices were restricted to audio- and still image-only streaming capabilities.

Conspiracy theorists surmised that Microsoft intentionally created this differentiation in order to prop up sales of MCE systems. Unlike Maury, I hadn't yet gotten around to building up a MCE PC (soon, dear readers, I promise....that long-delayed external storage interface shoot-out is still planned!), so I was out of luck as far as video streaming was involved. However, my patience (or was it procrastination?) was rewarded with the recent Dashboard update, which unlocked this feature for generic UPnP implementations. It, like the Spring Update before it, has temporarily 'broken' TwonkyMedia, but TwonkyVision hopes to have a v4.2 update released by month-end (and beta results on the forum are encouraging).

The video streaming results from my XP Pro-based desktop and XP Home-based laptop are tantalizing in their promise but incomplete in their implementation. I first tried streaming off my desktop system two high-def WMV clips I'd obtained from Microsoft a couple of years ago; the audio played fine but the video froze after a few seconds (although strangely enough, I could fast-forward through it). Network bandwidth starvation was my first thought, but that didn't make sense; my desktop PC contains a Gigabit Ethernet adapter, and the connection between it and the Xbox 360 comprises Cat5e wiring and two GbE switches. I was reassured when I found that all of the 720p and 1080p material from Microsoft's WMV HD Content Showcase streams fine (yes, I downloaded it all), and it elicited a rare 'oh wow' jawdrop from my wife when I showed it to her yesterday. I suspect that I'm running into some sort of a WMV profile limitation (no VBR support, perhaps, for example); I've made an inquiry to Microsoft's PR team and will get back to you with my findings.

Continued with 'Multimedia on the Xbox 360: Minor Stumbles and Next Steps'....