Blessed by the Potato

Well, I’ve got the Xbox all hooked up to the TV now, and Tversity running on my PC. I had no end of trouble trying to make it work at my parents’ house (I was in Toronto when I picked up the Xbox 360), with the Xbox connected via a wire to the router, and the computer with Tversity running over the wireless. But back at home with both the Xbox and the PC on a wired connection everything was up and running smoothly right away. I can stream files from my computer to the xbox, and they look great. If I had a high-def TV they’d probably look even better. I am having a minor problem with a few codecs, but since it’s only for one or two files I’m going to try forcing transcoding later to see how that works, and if that fails I’ll have to reinstall the codecs. One other minor annoyance is that there are a lot of default folders in the Tversity view on the Xbox, only one of which actually has content. It would be nice if I could get the Xbox to default to that one folder to start with.

Other than that though it’s working fantastic as a media streamer, well worth the money for that capability I think. I’m also gaming a little bit on it — I haven’t really enjoyed Lego Indiana Jones that came with it, but I got Gears of War 2 previously played from Rogers Video for $20, and I’m enjoying the use of cover in that shooter. My one-month trial to Xbox Live is just about over and I haven’t gamed multiplayer at all, so I suppose I’ll have to give that a shot soon. It seems like a really expensive system to game on: the Xbox Live subscription is $5/month normally (though Amazon has the 13-month card on for $52+tx right now); it’s another $60 for a second controller or guitar controller (and $200 for Rock Band), and even the “cheap” Xbox Live arcade games (like Castle Crashers) are $20.