Those of you who stopped using Azureus when it mutated into Vuze may want to reconsider your decision. The BitTorrent client now supports video playback on the PS3 and Xbox 360. That is, once the computer on which Vuze is running and your PS3 or Xbox 360 are on the same network, Vuze will play the video and send it to your TV, no matter what file format the video is in. I just tried it out using my Xbox 360, and here’s what I found.
It stinks. Oh, sure, it was able to play plain ol’ DVD rips—24 Hour Party People, encoded with Xvid—just fine over my vanilla 802.11g wireless network, but that’s only because the Xbox 360 natively supports that video file format. I then tried to play two x264 MKVs—a 1080p Blu-ray rip of I Am Legend (hi-res screenshot) and a 720p TV rip of a recent episode of Lost (hi-res screenshot)—and all Vuze can do is wink coyly at me. A conversion bar sits there, and then Vuze does its best to convert the video into a format palatable to the Xbox 360. Fair enough, but if you think I’m going to wait nearly three hours just to see the stupid time-traveling exploits of Jack and John Locke, you’re sorely mistaken. (To convert I Am Legend, it would have taken 15+ hours.)
And I use the phrase “it stinks” because you know the average BitTorrent user just wants to drag and drop his illicitly obtained Blu-ray rips and watch them on something other than his MacBook. This Vuze solution just doesn’t work as well as I’d initially hoped.
So, it’s back to watching videos on my 20-inch iMac. It’s no IMAX, but at least I’m not waiting dozens of hours just to watch some dumb movie.
A neat feature if all you’re watching is Xvid-encoded DVD rips, but anything more than that is pushing it, I think. But, by all means, go ahead and try it yourself; maybe you’ll have a better experience.
It’s a good effort … better than nothing and the first third party software that I’m aware of that will interact with the 360
There is also TVersity i think its called?
If you already have xbox 360 friendly formatted media you could stream it (at least under Linux) to said xbox with uShare for playback but it won’t transcode for you. You would have to spend the time to reencode media using avidemux or ffmpeg first and then stream with uShare. Another Linux alternative that will stream and transcode video on-the-fly is Fruppes.
I’ve used TVersity under Vista in the past and it works alright … it will probably work better with better hardware (no duh, right) but it at least will try and transcode for you on the fly.
I’ve read elsewhere that Microsoft uses a modifed version of the uPnP spec and as such a lot of the freeware uPnP media sharing solutions don’t boast xbox compatibility. As opposed to the DLNA profiles that playstation uses which seeminlgy has better playback support in the community.
I guess it’s cool that Vuze is doing this but it doesn’t seem very logical (to me) to control this type of functionality from within your BT client.
XenonMKV converts mkv files into a format that the 360 can read, and does it fairly quickly in most cases (on the order of 10 minutes or so).
Why not trying to use the streaming and transcoding powers of VLC?
I mean, the files are there, all you need is the xbox ip and set up a stream the xbox can understand (having no xbox myself i don’t know if this is feasible though since i don’t know how it deals with streams).
PC –DVI2HDMI-Cable–>HDTV
Or just use TVersity (http://tversity.com/)
Actually you dont have to transcode, right click on the xbox360 icon in devices, untick ‘only show transcoded files on this device’ then you can play anything straight after download, just tried this and it plays great, now you only have to convert the files that wont play (which is very few!)
Hi guys
I have a Macbook and am having problems streaming .mkv movies to my PS3.
Have tried the unticking “only show transcoded file on this device” and I can now see all of the movies on the PS3 but when I try playing them it says the data is unsupported.
I dragged the movie into PS£ in devices but it won’t convert it so kind of bummed out!
Any ideas?