7 Comments

Forget the Apple TV, use your XBox

May 14, 2007 by in Apple,Tech with 7 Comments

Nullriver Software recently released a handy application which will surely make any XBox owner a little happier. Connect360 allows users to stream any video, music, and photo content from your Mac directly to your XBox 360.

Your Xbox 360 is capable of playing back your music and viewing your digital photos. With Connect360, your Mac’s ready to share.

The beauty of the utility is that you manage all your files from a beautfiul interface on your Mac. No need to drop a few bills on an Apple TV when your current XBox 360 will suffice.


  • Adam Potts

    I used this for a while but stopped eventually because it only supported WMV video at the time…good to see they got MP4 working! :)

  • http://www.pjllobell.com PVLIII

    Is there something equivalent for Windows?

  • BroncoBash

    Glad they got this updated!

    I also stopped using it because of the WMV issue and the h.264 is a welcome change.

    However, I have dealt a lot with this over the past weekend. The last version of connect360 would only stream video content located in your “movies” folder. I own a macbook pro and do not have enough HDD space to do this on any kind of permanent basis.If I could just get that to work with an external it would be wonderful.

    Hooking up a formatted FAT32 external HDD to the 360 USB port is still your best bet for streaming. If you are a NAS user, installing Vista or XP media center on boot camp (VISTA will not find the extender in parallels! in my experience) and then mapping the network drives will work great. Media Center will watch the folders for changes and keep it up for streaming. OSX would gladly be used if mapping network drives could happen upon log in rather than having to manually do so every time i wish to connect.

    Which brings me to my question.. does anyone know of a way to have OSX automatically map and log into my NAS upon log in rather than me having to reconnect to each share over and over?

  • Hareron

    @BroncoBash

    Do a search on macosxhints. I know they have some hints on there on how automount network devices/shared folders.

  • Adam Potts

    I’m not sure about your network mapping issue Bronco, but I do know a roundabout way of getting Connect360 to use whichever movie folder you like. You can use this app to create what’s called a symbolic link, which is basically a hardcore alias/shortcut of sorts

    Just make a symlink to your desired movie folder, drop the symlink in your Home folder, and rename it “Movies”. Once you do that, as far as OS X is concerned, the folder on your external HD is the ‘Movies’ folder. This method is used by many (myself included) to hard-link to large-sized files located on an external drive (i.e. GarageBand loops, instruments, etc.).

    Just be sure to backup your original Movies folder first! :D

  • BroncoBash

    great! Thanks for the help.

    I did see that the updated version of connect360 now lets you pick an “other” folder to share but when i select in the xbox360 console the xbox just freezes until it eventually errors out and gives the ol’ unsupported format error…this is simply not true since i stream them from the server just fine with vista.

    Perhaps more bugs need to be worked out but its a great start to having a great media center.

    Thanks again

  • http://www.raymoo.com Joe

    Does anyone know if you can have these in multiple folders? Like if you have Kids videos in one folder, action in another, etc.. that way you dont need to go through the whole list of 300 videos to get to the middle.

    Joe

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