Hi All,
I am new to Windows Home server and built my own machine to use Windows Home Server. Right now I just have a 1 tb drive attached to the box. Hopefully down the road will expand.. I have installed updates on the box to make it to use Power Pack 2. I have heard that Power Pack 2 has media sharing possibilities.

Now Xbox 360 is on the network and see the WHS box when I go to Pictures and video section..

I have copied photos in the pictures shared folders and when i access them from the XBox I do not see them.. Media Sharing is enabled in the settings section. Am I doing something wrong?

Can I stream a movie DVD from WHS machine to the Xbox 360? Would I need additional software?

Thanks for any help. I am a noob at this.. bear with me please

If this is in the wrong section of the forum, I apologize.

Gremlin,

First off, welcome to the forums

Unfortunately you can't steam a DVD from the WHS machine to the Xbox360 out of the box. When you mention DVD I assume you are talking about a DVD ripped on your WHS and not a DVD that you just have in the Rom drive? There are a couple of alternatives that you can look at.

- Try a service such as TVersity, which will transcode the DVD on the fly from your WHS to your Xbox360. I have had limited success but only tried this a while back.
- Convert the DVD to a format that the Xbox360 will recognize. You can encode to several different formats such as mpeg, avi, mp4, etc... If you need more info on this let me know and I can give you some ideas.

As for the photos, not sure, they have always showed up on my Xbox360. Hopefully someone else here can chime and if I have some time later today when I get home for work I will check my settings.

Mods - can I recommend that we move this thread over to Media Streaming?

Gremlin - any luck you can post in the DIY Home Servers forums your WHS build?

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I would not mind posting but it is on a system with loose parts right now.. I am unemployed and once I find a job my old gaming machine will become new windows home server..

Looked at web pages around the web regarding Windows media center and whs? are you guys using it?

Sorry for posting the topic in the wrong thread..

There is probably a mix of folks who use WMC, SageTV, MediaPortal, and XBMC. My setup is currently somewhat of a hybrid where I use SageTV to handle live tv (main reason is because WMC has not been integrated fully into WHS) and use WMC for my media playback on my HTPCs (using the MediaBrowser plugin).

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I have a problem with my xbox 360.

I use DVDfab and it makes the avi file but when I store the file in the shared videos folder, the xbox can see it but when I hit play it says "can't play this content because it contains audio or video with an unsupported codec"

I can stream through my media center PC fine but not the home server.

Any ideas?

thanks!

First off, welcome to the forum

That is odd, unless it was a bad encode. Do you know what the audio track is, I am thinking you have an unsupported audio track (if you are not sure how to tell you can use a program like mediaInfo to give you this info). Here is what I could find about AVI in the Xbox360:

Q: What does the Xbox 360 console support for AVI?
A: The Xbox 360 console supports the following for AVI:

File extensions: .avi, .divx
Containers: AVI
Video profiles: MPEG-4 Part 2 (Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile)
Video bit rate: 5 Mbps with resolutions of 1280 × 720 at 30 fps. See the question about max bit rate, resolution, and frames per second.
Audio profiles: Dolby® Digital (2 channel and 5.1 channel), MP3
Audio max bit rate: No restrictions. See the question about max bit rate, resolution, and frames per second.

One other thing you can try to see if we can isolate the problem:

- Rip disk using DVDFab (only rip main movie). You should now have a Video_TS folder with multiple vobs
- Use VOBMerge to merge all the vobs into one big VOB file
- Use VOB2MPG to convert that big VOB file into MPEG.
- Now see if you can play the MPEG file on the Xbox360

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I don't have an Xbox, but I think you have to enable Guest mode in the Console to have access to the photos on the xbox.

_________________
HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.

We copy our dvds from the disc to the hard drive using AnyDVD - this gives us the opportunity to back up the files of the disc in case the kids continue to play frisbee with them....

Once copied with AnyDVD, we use Xilisoft DVD to MP4 converter to make a hi resolution mp4 file. Copy that to the Videos folder, make sure that Twonky is set to serve from the Videos directory, and we can serve all of our DVD videos from there without the wonderful intros, previews, and menus. Our XBox has become an invaluable part of our entertainment system between playing DVD rips, Netflix, and PlayOn to access tv on Hulu!

Hopefully this helps some.

Thanks for sharing and welcome to the forums

I think the only thing you lose (and correct me if I am wrong) is that by converting to mp4 for use with the Xbox360 you lose multi channel audio.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I believe you are correct about the multi-channel audio. The movies we are ripping right now are mostly kids movies (hence the comment about Frisbee's) so the multi-channel audio isn't a big loss for us. The HP Media Converter converts to h.234 if I read that correctly, but not all of the converted files play on the XBox360 - haven't had enough time to figure out why yet. I did notice that if i convert to MP4 at anything more than 48k sampling, the videos don't play - so I've been converting them at 48k sampling. So far everything is working great for us.

I will assume you meant h.264, otherwise that would explain why they don't play

I assume the Xbox360 can play wtv files. I think by converting to wtv you can maintain 5.1 but never tested out myself. Here is a good article just written on converting over to WTV:

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/10/converti ... olbox.html

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Ah yes, h.264, sorry - searching databases for values that have 234 in them.....