Microsoft, XBox 360, and Windows Media Player 11

First a little history.

Years ago I began building a media library for my home network. I began recording tv shows and backing up DVD's and CD's to my hard drive, then later to my home network media server. This worked out great, kind of like a home media "jukebox" without the need for quarters. Every PC in my home had access to our entire library of movies, music and recorded content with a few mouse clicks. Back then everything was great and running smooth. Those were the good ol' days. Then my son got an XBox 360 for Christmas... Or should I say "X-Mas"?

I really didn't mind too much shelling out $40 to $60 once or twice a month for the games, but just recently he discovered that an XBox 360 hooked up to the home network could stream video and music right from our Windows XP computers. And when he told me about it and asked if I could get him set up I magnanimously and idiotically promised that I would.

So I started researching the problem and found out that there are only two ways to do it. One is to own a Windows Media PC which is tailor made for such a task, and the other is to use Windows Media Player 11 on an XP or Vista system. I didn't have the Media Center PC but I did have Windows Media Player on my XP PC. I was off to a good start with the first hurdle cleared. Unfortunately I stumbled a little when I got to the next hurdle.

It seems that XBox 360 will only play WMV and MP4 video formats. Now I've been a fan of the DivX format for a few years so that is what the format of most of my videos are (avi), but I said what the hell and did some more research.

I discovered that, based on the two criteria of quality and compression, mp4 beats the daylights out of wmv so I downloaded the necessary encoding software and began cranking out mp4's. I started with ten kids movies in one batch. After about 4 hours the batch was done. Much to my dismay, however, none of the mp4's would play in windows media player, nor would they play on any other player I had. When I checked the XBox 360 to see if it had access to them I was further dismayed to find that it did not.

So at this point I was thinking that either the new mp4's were screwed up or that windows media player simply wouldn't play them. After a little more checking I discovered that, in fact, WMP would not play them, but that if I downloaded the hddirectshow codec it would. I downloaded it, installed it, and lo and behold I still couldn't play them. I returned once more to the web and eventually discover that to play mp4's on the XBox 360 I need the Zune Player. Ok... No problem.

Once that is downloaded and installed I tried again. Success! I can play mp4's on my pc and they are also available to the XBox 360 so long as I have file sharing enabled on the Zune Player. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

After playing around with the Zune for a while I quickly discover that this software is very labor intensive for the pc. Even if the player is not running on the pc the file sharing processes suck up about 40 megs of RAM when it is running in the background. That's no big deal I have 1 gig, but when I play a movie on the XBox 360 that number jumps to nearly 200 megs and holds steady while the movie plays. Then if I start the player on my PC I add about another 100 megs to that number. At this point, considering all other processes running at the same time my available RAM was looking pretty small, not to mention that Zune is also sucking up about 50% of my cpu resources as well.

In other words, I could pretty much forget about doing any work on my pc if the kids are all watching movies or tv. (Did I forget to mention that the only tv we get is off the internet?) I gave up paying for satellite tv quite a while back and don't miss it at all.

As of today I have found a partial solution. Not a perfect one, but the best I can come up with so far. My solution is to run the Zune file sharing software in the background but never start the player. Instead I found a media player that is a great deal more thrifty with system resources and a great deal more versatile than any other media player I have. Many of you may be familiar with it. It's called VLC media player, and with a little help from the Haali Metroska splitter, plays mp4's just fine, not to mention almost every other video format.