Xbox 360: Stream DivX and Xvid files with Nero 8

I am excited enough this evening to take a few minutes and write about my first hour with the Xbox 360 and Nero 8 suite. I became the proud owner of Microsoft’s new console in early April 2006. After bad experiences with PC games, including hundreds I never played, I decided to stick with one game. I bought the first-person shooter Perfect Zero, and it has stayed in the console since then.

I tried connecting my video collection a couple of times, but could only stream WMV and DVD content. Even Windows Media Center on Vista would only play WMV.

Two months ago, I configured my new Q6600 system and installed the Nero 8 evaluation suite. After reading about streaming media to an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, I decided to try it.

Configure Nero Scout and MediaHome

I configured Nero Scout and indexed the files. The Internet Services option lets you add your preferred RSS feeds for web radio, video, audio and images.

I then opened Nero MediaHome and started the server.

Find the computer and test playback

I turned on the Xbox 360, opened the Media tab and selected Video. I had trouble getting the computer name to appear. I could not delete the old computer the Xbox had seen a couple of weeks earlier, so I started my Windows XP machine and enabled media sharing in Windows Media Player 11. Once the XP machine was on the network, the Xbox found my Q6600 system and its Nero MediaHome content. Strange, but it worked.

I browsed the directories and opened five different types of WMV, DivX and Xvid file. All played without problems. It takes 5–10 seconds to buffer a file; after that, the content streams without problems.

I can now watch my favourite geek show, DL.tv, without first copying the files to a USB disk and connecting it to my home theatre’s USB host. It works.

Try the DL.tv RSS feed next

I downloaded these four files manually. DL.tv also has an RSS feed, and I plan to try adding its XML file to Nero Scout. Here are a couple more pictures:

If you are tired of codec errors on the Xbox 360, you can download Nero 8 from the Nero website. Some people complain that Nero has become a suite of fancy tools, but for me, having Nero MediaHome on the LAN makes it worthwhile.