Matt presented the Vista: After Hours event in Leeds which I attended and wrote about in a previous post. I’ve just had time to read his blog and he has written about the issue I’ve been having with Media Centre extending, and for those of you who haven’t got a clue what I’m on about; I have an Xbox 360 games console, this is the latest games machine made by Microsoft, which features High Definition graphics, but it does alot more than just play games! The first thing is internet, it can be plugged into a modem or router via the tradional wired solution or using the wireless adaptor connect it to your wireless router elsewhere in the house leaving your living room free of flashing router lights. This allows the latest updates for the machine to be downloaded and installed directly. It also gives you a virtual market place where you can download game demos (its great to try before you buy!), extra content for games such as new cars for racing games or new maps for adventure games, theres even music, video and TV shows to download, although the TV content is thin on the ground for the UK market at the moment but should increase steadily over the coming year.

But thats not all, if you have a Media Center PC, either XP Media Center Edition or Vista Home Premium/Ultimate, you can mirror the media content stored on your PC. One of my favourite uses is to show photographs, I’m haven’t had photos printed for many years now, I just give friends and family my photos on a CD, at not much more than 10p per CD its a cost effective way to show your photos and they can keep the CD to view when they like, but with Media Center I can show the photos on my large screen TV without having to make a CD, the photos are sent wirelessly from the PC to the Xbox, and they play as a slideshow, you may think thats alot of hassle just to show photos, but then think of all the other media possibilities, TV and films downloaded from the internet can be viewed, even high definition content, and music and internet radio, thats just for starters, you can then add a TV tuner card to your PC and use your PC as a video recorder, then stream them to your Xbox 360 to watch on the TV.

But what about all the people who haven’t got Media Center PC’s, fear not, because there is still a solution to stream your content to the Xbox 360, although you lose the Media Center interface you can link the 2 machines and find your photos, music and videos on your PC.

And back to my initial thank you to Matt, the problem I was having was that I couldn’t find my video files, the Xbox 360 displayed all the folders on my PC but then told me they were empty!!! So I had a good dig around the internet for a solution and determined not to be defeated, in the early hours of the morning I stumbled across my answer, and if you’d like to know what it is, then you’ll have to take a look at Matt’s blog where he’s kindly detailed the answer.

View it here: http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit/

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