creating a home media server with mac and xbox360

[sethmichael]

Xbox 360 as of today supports mpeg4 and h.264 video of all shapes and sizes. Seeing as how I have one, and not an apple tv, i'd like to take advantage of it and rip my content to a usb2 hard drive so I can avoid optical discs.

How can I create a shared network drive that will play my ripped dvd's, but's still accessible to my mac on a network so I can drag and drop new files?

 

[geekytrent]

easiest way of doing that is buying a wireless router that supports usb drives, put the drive to the router and format the drive as fat32, and both the xbox and the mac will be able to read/write to it.

 

[Schroedinger]

i would also suggest connect360 which will allows you to connect your mac to the xbox360 as if it was a PC. You can then stream off of your computer. I think you can download a trial that limits the number of movies, songs, and photos it'll stream, but it'll give you an idea of what it does. And this way, you can keep your drives mac formatted b/c the mac will be doing the streaming.

good luck.

P.S. I've got Connect360 on my mac pro and stream to my xbox360 and it works well and does exactly what I need it to do, so I do recommend it.

 

[sethmichael]

The only problems are connect 360 doesn't have an update yet to support the mpeg4 features (i'm sure they're working on it), and the bigger issue which is my network sucks in my apt. The walls are concrete, so on my desk the bars down down to nothing. I'm afraid of investing in something and the streaming quality is crap -- which is half the reason i've avoided apple tv.