Pumping Irony

One thing I love about the Xbox 360 is its ability to stream media from my PC so I can watch it on the wide screen television. I can tolerate watching short videos on the PC but there’s absolutely no way I’d watch a movie or even a 30 minute sitcom.

I started off with the normal Windows Media Player 11, which streams .wmv to any 360 on the network. Since I have a Zune, I switched to the Zune software which streams .wmv and .mp4 video (and can transcode it to the Zune as well). The Zune software also streams embedded album art (or a thumbnail if none is embedded) which is a great touch. When I got the .mp4 versions of the Dr. Horrible episodes, for example, I embedded the art from iTunes.

However, even though the Zune increased video types (and audio but I rarely stream audio) and codecs it would recognize, it’s still not enough. Most other filetypes required me to transcode to .wmv or .mp4 first, which is extra work I’d rather not go through if I don’t have to. So I look at third-party options.

TVersity has become my favorite to date. It’s a little on the “techie” side, and I still haven’t gotten it to set the menus and titles the way I want, but it handles just about every video codec and file type I have on my system. I can even download .flv video from YouTube and others and TVersity will transcode on the fly and stream to the 360. It will also accept RSS feeds to auto-download videos from any site that includes the video embed code. In a bit of curiosity, I did set my P2P client to download Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk movies (both of which I’ve already seen in theatres) just to see 1) how TVersity deals with really long files (perfectly fine) and 2) how these illegal movies play (like complete CRAP). Seriously, does anyone actually keep those? Do they consider them “good enough” cinematic experiences? The video is washed out and saturated, off-center and off-kilter, the audio is garbage… pretty much what I expected of camcordering a movie from a theatre screen. Deleted. But I digress… All in all, TVersity is a great media server with one exception: the source video must be on your PC.

Enter PlayOn, from MediaMall, currently in beta. The present build only accepts a few hard-coded sources, with Netflix coming soon, but where TVersity handled local files, PlayOn’s strength is in handling only streaming video. Where TVersity would pull YouTube videos from RSS feeds then transcode and stream, PlayOn will stream from YouTube, transcode then stream to the 360 without having to save the source file. The big draw to PlayOn for me personally is not YouTube, however; it’s Hulu support! I’ve pretty much ignored the whole Hulu thing because it requires me to watch at the PC. No more! Just like with YouTube, PlayOn streams any of Hulu’s video content, transcodes on the fly and streams to the 360. The catch is that currently it will only pull the SD content, completely ignoring HD versions if they happen to be available. Perhaps it will come later, perhaps not. I notice sometimes streaming an WMVHD file, which requires no transcoding, the 360 is buffering pretty often, resulting in an unpleasant play-pause cycle. I’m on an 802.11G network, which should handle the traffic fine, although I do have WPA enabled. I remember on my older B network, WEP created a great deal of latency and made the PS2 and Xbox unplayable online until I turned off WEP. Is WPA similar? Do I need to turn it off before streaming to get the best bandwidth? Anyway, between bandwidth and CPU usage during transcoding, I question if PlayOn will be able to acceptably handle HD video.

I haven’t experimented with all the (few) supported sites in PlayOn, mostly concentrating my viewing on Hulu. I do appreciate that PlayOn picks up a thumbnail image, something I’d like to see added to TVersity someday. It’s definitely beta, however. So far every time I first connect the 360 to the PlayOn server, I’ll get an error the first time I try to stream any video. After that error, it works flawlessly.

I’m enjoying Hulu, though as with any media portal, content is always an issue. Other than that my only Hulu gripe is that (at least on the movies I’ve watched so far) the audio volume level on the movies is fairly quiet, so I have to turn up my tv volume to compensate. Then their commercials ARE DEAFENINGLY LOUD!

Anyone have any other suggestions I should check into, or better yet, any video sources to download (since PlayOn does not yet accept user-submitted sources) entertaining (and legal!) high-quality video?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.