that geeky dude

Every since I got a 360, I’d been looking for ways to stream media from my PC to the 360. The HP came with Vista Home Premium, but the 360’s media center extender function doesn’t work with Xvid or DivX video, preferring Microsoft’s WMV codec (which you can’t find anything popular in)

I had been using TVersity to stream media, since it shows up in the UPnP browser for the 360, but the quality loss is evident, with major artifacting evident in action scenes or scenes with a lot of movement, not to mention that it’s a resource hog and you can’t do anything on the computer while it’s transcoding.

Well, a couple of days ago WinAmp bugged me to upgrade to the latest version, and when I went to the about page, I saw something about Winamp Remote, which ostensibly would allow you to share your music and movies over the network, including to your Wii, PS3 or 360, and over the internets. I couldn’t resist and had to try it, even though I’ve never enjoyed upgrading Winamp (anyone remember Winamp 3 and how fast Nullsoft backpedaled on it?)

Well, I have to say I’m impressed. After adding my Music and Video folders to the Winamp Remote systray applet and giving it sufficient time to wander through my library reading the metadata (10,000+ MP3s and a couple hundred Xvid/Divx/WMV videos), I turned on the 360, disconnected from TVersity, and connected to Winamp Remote. I saw a better organized selection of folders than TVersity offered, along with thumbnails for the videos, typically the first or second frame of the video, which isn’t helpful on a lot of TV shows since it’s fading in, but for movies it was fine.

I picked a video pretty much at random to play (not really, it was the first episode of ESPN’s coverage of the $50k HORSE tournament at the World Series of Poker), and was amazed at how fast the streaming started compared to TVersity. I was also pleasantly surprised to note that Winamp Remote apparently lets you fast-forward and rewind the streaming video, whereas TVersity can’t do that until it’s done transcoding (basically you can’t ff/rw on the first view, but you can all subsequent views) — Also, the videos started off at full screen, rather than being little widescreen video boxes surrounded by black screen.

Granted, I probably could have done some manual tweaking to the TVersity settings, but as evidenced by my purchase of an HP desktop versus building my own, I’ve gotten lazy in my ‘old age’ and would rather not have to fiddle with settings and the like to get it to look the way I want it to.

Five stars for Winamp Remote’s media streaming.