Yazsoft Playback

The main problem is that the XBOX360 doesn't support a number of filetypes that OSX can handle. If you encode your videos with the XBOX360 in mind then it shoul work just fine, but that would be silly.

Pretty sure it doesn't support MKVs at all. It hasn't worked for me. From their site:

The following types of media are supported when using Windows Media Center with the Xbox 360 console:

Video

* Windows Media Video (WMV) 7, WMV 8, and WMV 9
o Maximum resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p)
o Windows Media Audio Standard or Windows Media Audio Pro audio
o WMV content may be Windows Media DRM-protected
* MPEG-1 with MPEG-1 layer I or II audio
* MPEG-2
o Maximum resolution of 1920x1080 (1080i)
o AC-3 or MPEG-1 layer I or II audio
* WMV Image 1 (Photo Story 1 & 2), and WMV Image 2 (Photo Story 3)

Audio

* Windows Media Audio (WMA) 7 through WMA 9
o WMA Standard content may be Windows Media DRM-protected
* WMA Professional
o WMA Professional content may be Windows Media DRM-protected
* WMA Lossless
o Windows Media DRM protected WMA Lossless is not supported
* MP3
* Other formats that have a DirectShow decoder installed on the host computer that outputs pulse code modulation (PCM) audio

Ahh, I didn't notice that you were originally inquiring about this product. Let me give it a go and I'll report back. If this actually works, it could be a reason to buy an xbox360/ps3 in lieu of another mini!

Okay, just did some tinkering. Yazsoft does NOT transcode the video, IE, you can't access your media files through the xbox360 and then have yazsoft allow you to play them on the fly.

It puts the video into an mp4 container and then allows you to watch the files. And it may reencode the audio as well. It took about 10 minutes for it to convert a 3.5gb 720p movie and it basically gave me another copy of the movie (with a similar file size) which the xbox360 could then play.

By no means is this a perfect solution. But if you want to stream a movie to your xbox360, it is possible. Even if it did transcode, it's doubtful it would do so at a level that retained the original quality of the video.

I stand by my initial statement that another mini would be the best way to do this, but clearly that is not an option for many people. With that said, this software does seem to make it reasonably easy assuming you have 15 minutes to sort everything out prior to watching.

I use Playback to stream from my Mac to Xbox 360 (new slim).
Xbox required a free software update to play mp4/ aac media.
Playback works flawlessly for what it does do.

All of my movies are encoded by Handbrake in Normal, (h264, 5.1 DD w/ m4v file extension.
All my itunes music streams AAC or mp3, unless it is DRM protected content like digital Copy movies.
All of my iphoto albums show up as well.

The Xbox does seem to cache things, so an update to cover art for a movie sometimes takes a minute to show up, sometimes a week.

The Xbox will not wake up my mac (probably because I do not have an Airport router).

I tried to get the Xbox to play streaming radio from itunes and that will not work. Gives me an incompatiable file format, since its a .pls extension.

I stream hardwired on a 10/100 network and there are NO hiccups playing the file. Picture quality seems to be near-DVD on a 50" plasma.

I send the sound to a soundbar via optical out and am getting only 2.0 DD to bar. I don't know if I am having encoding problems or if it is the optical out on the xbox.

Also, the volume seemed low on the movies, but simply going into iTunes and bumping up the volume enhancement for the movie files under Get Info/options fixed it.

Playback doesn't use much memory or cpu time. Can easily do any other work while streaming on a 2008 iMac w/ 4gig ram. Don't even know its working in the background.

Thats all I can think of for now...