Plasmas and Xbox 360 Media Extender

[balders]

Hi,

I'm thinking about taking the plunge and getting myself a plasma (Panasonic 42PX70 or Pioneer 427XD are favourite at the moment), but was wondering how well my Xbox 360 would handle being used as a Media Center Extender.

The reason for my concern is the 1024x768 resolution - can the 360 handle this sufficiently well to be able to correctly display photos and video in a widescreen format. I've read that when running a media center pc on a 1024 plasma you need to change the WMP display settings to take account of the rectangular pixels, so does the 360 somehow take this into account too when running as an extender?

Thanks,

Balders.

 

[thecheekyscamp]

As most plasma's have built in scalers you would not need to adjust anything... let the screen scale the image correctly;

i run a 360 through vga at 1380 X 768 to my panny ph9 (as the screen scales the image correctly as 16:9 from this res).

be warned, unless the pictures are BIG they're gonna look pretty blocky upscaled.

on a side note, the media visualisations have a black border i can't get rid of, which is doing no good to my screen...

 

[balders]

Cheers. Sounds like all will be find and dandy then.

I'm interested in why pictures may look blocky though? If the picture is, say 4mp, won't it need to be downscaled to fit the plasma resolution? Or does the extender only get given a standard def version of the picture and have to upscale this?

Thanks,

Balders.

 

[giggsy13]

bizarrely through VGA media centre XVIDs streamed look like utter crap, however via component awesome. It is vice versa for normal DVDs, they look awesome via VGA upscaled, and worse via component!

Not that it matters now I have my Oppo for upscaling.

I have just bought the xbox HD drive, a serious amount of titles available. Time to jump on board, its a no brainer when you can pick one up for £100 on ebay. Samsung have announced they are making a hybrid HD/Blueray player, no doubt they will be cheap as chips within next 18 months.

HD has some excellent releases, and the HD drives are multi region meaning can import from US (ther are loads of ebay sellers selling imports). The PS3 blueray is not multi region, much to my bessie mates dismay who has a grand total of 3 decent films to watch at the minute! Europe gets stiffed by Sony (AGAIN!!!)