So I've been meaning to look at Windows Media Player 11 and how it can stream video to the Xbox 360. Apple's announcement of the imminent release of Apple TV pushed me to figure out whether I needed such a device. Answer is that I don't, but WMP blows chunks. Big surprise. Tackling things one at a time.

1) WMP will indeed stream video (or at least it claims to), but it will only stream WMV's. Truthfully I didn't test this - I don't really care, because I don't have any WMV files. C'mon Microsoft that's retarded.

2) If you look at the web page the Xbox 360 send you to, it will tell you install the Zune software. With grave misgivings I did this. Man it looks terrible. Zune is even more restricted than WMP - it won't even play AVI files. I spent more time downloading and installing the Zune software than I did testing it.

3) Connect 360 - a product that I have recommended (and still do) for audio streaming from a Mac only supports WMV video as well. (sigh)

4) But there is a fix - and it's freeware. If you have a Windows XP machine then you can run TVersity! (EDIT 5/14/07 - the link was changed from .org to .com) Basically you install this on your Windows machine and it will transcode a file to WMV in real-time and stream it to your 360. The claim is that any file that Media player can play will transcode. I know XVID and DiVX files work.

TVersity is a bit rough. My 360 basically locks up when the stream finishes - you have to bring up the Guide and reboot into the dash. Video streaming to the 360 means you can't fast-forward or rewind. I don't know if that's a 360 feature, or unique to TVersity. I guess I should try digging up a WMV and feed it to the Media Player. But if you have an XP machine, a 360, and a collection of video files in formats other than WMV you should try it out. Note that it won't support DRM'ed files - so if you do buy stuff from iTunes the Apple TV might be a better solution. For me - it's not clear whether Apple TV will play more open formats yet.

I believe TVersity is transcoding at the file's native resolution, and the 360 appears to be upscaling to 1080i - and it preserves aspect ratios. It's doing a pretty good job. It's certainly not HD, and it's not even really DVD quality. But it's much better than my previous solution for playing video files on the home theater - hooking my PowerBook up via SVideo.

Anyway, if you have video files that you'd like to watch on a 360, definitely give TVersity a try. Well worth the (free) cost.

technorati tags:Xbox_360, video, TVersity, Apple_TV

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So this DS Lite? Holy crap, it doesn't even look like the same console. While I was out and about today I stopped in at a Target to check out a demo unit. I knew it was smaller and I knew the screens were brighter, yadda, yadda. But this isn't just a matter of brightness, the colors seem about twice as saturated, no kidding. And you know how the lower screen (the one with the touch screen) on a DS is sort of muddy and rainbow-y ? Not so on the DS Lite. I fully expected to say "Yeah, whatever." like when the GB Micro came out. Instead I bought two. (And on the stupid "There are shortages! Oh my! You should have pre-ordered one." theme I'll note that Target had a stack of them, no bundling, no attempts to sell me an extended warranty, just two units, a game (Tetris DS for the summer-bound girl of the house) and we're outta here.) Target seems to be a much better game store than EB or Gamestop these days. A sad comment but true. Anyway, if you have DS games you play I highly recommend a DS Lite. The screens are like PSP-level clear and saturated (although still lower res). It's an amazing difference. Remember when the GBA SP came out and the GBA looked all shoddy? It's that level of difference (in my case I'd say the DS-DS Lite difference was greater than the GBA-GBA SP difference, but that's only because I had installed an Afterburner light pipe in my GBA.)

So the Xbox 360 has wireless controllers. This is cool. Significantly cooler than the Wavebird - I have two Wavebirds and ultimately gave up on them in favor of wired controllers. When I first heard about the 360 controllers I didn't think it was a big deal because the Wavebirds left a bad taste in my mouth. There were several reasons for that, all of which the 360 controller fixes. 1) No rumble. It's true - Wavebirds lack the rumble feature. This isn't critical but it makes the Wavebird feel like a second class controller. 2) Controller identity is unclear. The way Wavebirds work is there's a dial with teeny-tiny numbers on the bottom of the controller. Under bright light you set the dial to one of sixteen possible frequencies. The receiver plugs into the Gamecube and has a similar dial. You set the dial to a matching frequency and plug it in. But these numbers aren't readable in normal operation. So I set two controllers on the table - tell me which one is controller 1. You can't. The 360 controllers have that "ring of light" thing so looking at the controller itself shows me whether it is controller one or controller two. There is one other way of identifying the Wavebirds - when one transmits it's receiver has a light that indicates reception. If you can see the receivers you can push buttons and see which controller it is. But you might not be sitting somewhere where you can see the receivers. I would settle for Wavebirds being available in colors - but they are Model T's - any color you want as long as that color is gray. 3) Batteries. The Wavebird takes regular batteries and eats them pretty quickly. Worse, there's a on/off switch on the controller (independent of the console) and if you leave it on accidentally the batteries will be dead the next time you want to play. (In all fairness the 360 controllers come with AA's as well, but they have an option to replace the AA's with a high-capacity rechargeable battery.) The 360 controllers will idle out and turn themselves off, so the on/off switch problem is avoided. 4) Aesthetics. There are a lot of things about the Gamecube aesthetics that have always confused me, but the Wavebird receivers just look bad and ugly stuck on the front of my cutesy purple Gamecube. So anyway, about that rechargeable battery for the Xbox 360 controller. Right now the only way to charge them is by what Microsoft calls a "Play and Charge kit". The kit consists of one battery (you can buy batteries separately) and the charging cable. The cable is USB on one end and connects to the controller on the other end. The controller end has a charging light to show the charing status. So far so good. The one overwhelmingly dumb thing is this: the 360 only powers the USB ports when it is on. So you can Play and Charge sure enough, but you can't plug in the controller, turn off the system and go to bed and have a charged controller when you wake up in the morning. D'oh! As the title of this post indicates - it isn't a a "Play or Charge". You want to charge, you have to play :-) In all fairness I'm not even sure any hardware powers the USB ports when it is turned off - I tried the PS2 and it does not. My Powerbook doesn't even seem to power the USB ports when it is in sleep mode. But since the 360 USB ports seem primarily intended to be charging stations, I wish they had addressed this. There is a "quick charge kit" which is basically a wall wart with places for two battery packs, but that's not available for another couple of weeks (six months after system launch).

So yeah it works. I can actually boot Karin's Powerbook with my cloned HD and everything is fine. There is some way apps can tell - iTunes made me accept a license agreement and iPodderX mentioned it wasn't "activated" on that machine - but it works just fine. Seems almost spooky to transplant my desktop around like that, but if it works . . . . However, after a glorious two hours waiting for the Genius Bar I dropped Kool-Aid off this morning and got the call this evening. In theory by tomorrow even I should be back in business. And then I can install Virtual PC and iWork. And THEN, if people aren't careful I might actually do some writing. Shocker!

So this seems really weird to me. I'm writing this on my Powerbook, but I'm booted from an external drive. I went to Best Buy and grabbed a 300 Gig Firewire drive (big enough for us to back up multiple Powerbooks on). Partitioned it, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my laptop drive onto a partition. The entire honking drive - just cloned it right over. It took a while (I wasn't timing it, but I had time to clean the kitchen, load the dishwasher, make Karin's lunch for tomorrow and do some magazine reading.) So that finished. Turn off the Mac, turn it back on while holding down the Option Key and blam - up pops a little menu listing the bootable drives. I booted off the firewire drive and now everything is running just spiffy - just no longer on a drive of debatable provenance. I actually just changed the wallpaper so I could be sure to keep track of which disk I was using. Desktop, mail, web bookmarks everything came over just fine. So now in theory I can let Apple replace the internal HD, get it back and just resume business as usual. I don't know - somehow cloning the entire OS install like that just felt weird. And the fact that this drive can simultaneously support multiple laptops - bizarre. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect I could take this drive and boot Karin's laptop - into my OS, my crazy preferences and my email file. (I'll try that tomorrow if Apple keeps Kool-Aid overnight.) If I actually have my desktop, all my data, and all my applications on an external hard drive I can connect to any Firewire Mac and boot up well that just means I'm talking to you from the FUTURE baby!