Blaze’s Xploder Xbox 360 Media Center or Transcode 360? It’s a complete no-brainer really, but I’ll come back to that.
What do these things allow you to do? Well, let’s say you’ve got a Xbox 360 (and if not why not?). Let’s also say you’ve got a PC running Windows Media Center 2005. For those of you not familiar with Media Center it’s a complete Windows XP installation with an interface added on top to let you manage audio and video among other things. The idea is that you plug your PC into your TV and use Media Center to manage your digital lifestyle. However, if you have an Xbox 360 there is much fun to be had.
Media Center allows you to stream audio and video to Media Center Extender devices. The Xbox 360 is one of these. There’s an add-on piece of software for your Media Center PC.
Once you’ve done all this though you can only actually stream those video file formats that are normally supported by Windows Media Player - namely mpeg2 and wmv files. If you want to stream avi files or files encoded with Divx you’re going to need even more software. Divx is becoming quite pervasive on the Internet and proves to be a great format (because of it’s compression and quality retention) for backing up your DVDs.
So that’s where transcoding tools like Xploder Media Center and Transcode 360 come in. Both install on your PC and add new menu items to the ‘Info’ menus for your video files that would otherwise not stream to your Xbox 360.
Having tried both I can heartily recommend Transcode 360. Quite frankly it’s better than Xploder Media Center. Why? Is it because it’s free, when Xploder’s software is £29.99 (£19.99 for the download version)? Well no. Is it because Xploder uses Video LAN Client ‘behind the scenes’ to do it’s transcoding? Well, no because I’m a fan of VLC. Is it because Xploder has no ‘fast forward’ capability whereas Transcode 360 does? Well no. It’s all of the above. Hands down Transcode 360 wins in all areas IMHO.
So save your £19.99. Xploder Media Center isn’t worth it. Make a Paypal donation of say $5 to the guy writing Transcode 360. Maybe Microsoft will hire him.
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[...] Menori.com is now blocked by the enterprise web security product Websense. I’m not sure whether I’m flattered or not, but menori now comes under the category of games. Clearly my relentless posts about gaming on the Xbox 360, streaming Divx to the Xbox 360 and other general tidbits have had be categorised as being ‘bad’ for corporates. [...]