Tranferring movies from laptop

[Michael045]

Is it possible to transfer movies I have on my laptop onto my Xbox HDD?

 

[King Tones]

Nope, you can stream from your laptop but you cant transfer to your 360 HDD

 

[Member 79251]

You can put them on a usb stick and use that on the Xbox.

 

[Michael045]

Yea that's what I do now, stream them. Just thought there might have been some way to store them on HDD. Never mind, lovefilm it is!

 

[RicksonGracie1972]

You can put them on a usb stick and use that on the Xbox.

Isnt the xbox limited to the type of files it can play though?

 

[DJSigma]

Isnt the xbox limited to the type of files it can play though?

The main thing it's missing is native support for MKV containers.

It'll play DivX, Xvid, WMV, Quicktime, MPEG-4, H.264 in various containers, so the most common formats are covered, but there are some limitations. For instance, you can play an AVI in 720p with 5.1 audio, but you can't play one that's 1080p. WMV and H.264 support up to and including 1080p.

All you can really do is try it though, cos there's so many different ways for files to be encoded.

I'd like to see MKV and FLAC support, although I doubt we'll get either. I encode movies to MKV using Handbrake as you can embed subtitle files, add chapter markers and stuff, so that's useful. All of my CDs are ripped to lossless FLAC. I have to transcode everything on the fly via MediaMonkey to stream it to the 360 (which works fine, but native support is better!).

 

[RicksonGracie1972]

The main thing it's missing is native support for MKV containers.

It'll play DivX, Xvid, WMV, Quicktime, MPEG-4, H.264 in various containers, so the most common formats are covered, but there are some limitations. For instance, you can play an AVI in 720p with 5.1 audio, but you can't play one that's 1080p. WMV and H.264 support up to and including 1080p.

All you can really do is try it though, cos there's so many different ways for files to be encoded.

I'd like to see MKV and FLAC support, although I doubt we'll get either. I encode movies to MKV using Handbrake as you can embed subtitle files, add chapter markers and stuff, so that's useful. All of my CDs are ripped to lossless FLAC. I have to transcode everything on the fly via MediaMonkey to stream it to the 360 (which works fine, but native support is better!).

Is this something that has changed recently then as I recall the Xbox not being able to play much, if anything, from a USB stick.

 

[DJSigma]

Nope. It's had that functionality since an update in 2007.

 

[RicksonGracie1972]

Nope. It's had that functionality since an update in 2007.

I connected my laptop to my Xbox over the weekend via the media player and as suspected it doesnt play any of the videos I have on it

 

[DJSigma]

The laptop hard drive is probably formatted to NTFS, which the 360 doesn't support.

 

[RicksonGracie1972]

The laptop hard drive is probably formatted to NTFS, which the 360 doesn't support.

Ok, so is it likely to work from a memory stick or would that also be formatted to NTFS?

 

[DJSigma]

Ok, so is it likely to work from a memory stick or would that also be formatted to NTFS?

Thinking about it, Stu, what I said previously may be incorrect.

If you attach a hard drive or memory stick to the 360 and you want to play movies directly from that, it must be formatted to either FAT32 or HFS+. USB sticks will probably be formatted to FAT32 when you buy them, but you can do it within Windows (which will wipe the stick of course).

If you're streaming from a PC/laptop via Windows Media Player or a third party app, then the file system is irrelevant.

So in your case, you were streaming from a laptop via WMP, right? If so, what I said about the file system does not apply.

Check the following: -

1. Make sure the Optional Media Update has been downloaded from Xbox Live. You'll be prompted to download this the first time you try and play a video file that requires it.

2. If streaming doesn't work, take a USB stick (make sure it's formatted to FAT32) and copy a few videos to it, then see if they'll play when it's plugged directly into the 360. If they do - but they don't play when streaming - then it's a set up issue.

If they don't play from the USB stick when the Optional Media Update has been downloaded, then it's probably because of incompatible codecs. There's lots of different combinations of codecs and settings, even just for AVI containers, for example. People sometimes assume that "AVI is AVI", meaning that they're all the same, but they're not.

If you're not encoding your own videos, then the best solution is to use software that can transcode the videos on the fly, then stream from a PC or laptop. The 360 will play any audio/video file type then, although you'll need a PC/laptop of sufficient power (mostly for HD content) to do the transcoding, and there may be a small amount of quality loss.

 

[niall campbell]

you dont need to use windows media centre

just press the centre X on your remote , scroll right to media, select video and choose your PC. as long as your folder in shared and you have allowed windows for xbox to access your files

your better buying a NAS with an ethernet connection. Hook that up to your router and its always on with no need for PC

use freemake.com to convert your files to Divx or AVi

most TVs and bluray players will play divx through DLNA so get the NAS