The HOF Weblog

This article describes techniques on how to stream media from your PC to your TV using an X-BOX 360.

I’ve got a problem. TV rightly sucks in Thailand. Thankfully, there is a solution. It’s called EZTV. At EZTV, I can find hundreds of shows to download and watch on my PC or—better yet—my home theatre.

To download from EZTV, you'll need a bittorrent client. I recommend either µTorrent or Azureus. µTorrent is very small and lean, whereas Azureus is more feature rich and heavy.

Another good site for locating all kinds of torrents including music, TV, and movies is Torrentz.

The X-BOX 360 is chiefly a gaming console; however, I bought it for the purposes of streaming media to the TV room. You do this by setting up the X-BOX 360 as a media extender. I won’t write the how to on this, as it’s already been done.

Once you’ve got the extender setup, you should be able to play music, view picture, and watch videos on your TV via the X-BOX 360. The thing that Microsoft does (which really pisses a lot of people off) is that they only support Windows Media Files (WMV). What this means is that if you want to watch videos downloaded from EZTV or elsewhere, you’ll need to either transcode (convert) the AVI files (usually encoded with DivX or Xvid) to WMV manually or transcode them on the fly with some very cool software that is out there.

The Happy Beggar has taught me and can teach you how to manually convert, using a program called VLC; however, this is a long process that takes up a lot of time and disk space. I did this for a long while until I discovered VLC360 and VME.

Both VLC360 (French made) and VME will transcode on the fly, meaning that they will convert AVI files to WMV while you are watching them. This is cool stuff!

One key thing is that you do need to have your codecs setup right before these will work. I recommend the Vista Codec Pack for Vista or simply using XVID and FFDShow. I don’t recommend using the DivX codec as this does all kinds of crazy stuff and can screw up your streaming.

Both VLC360 and VME have their glitches. VLC360 likes to pause sometimes mid-stream, but then it will catch up and play eventually. I have not quite got VME to work perfectly (as it should); however, it does seem to pause less than VLC360. I’ve actually purchased a personal license for VME for a reasonable 3.99 pounds. Hopefully, with the support of the developer, this will be the way forward.

So in summary: get your TV from EZTV (if the writers ever come off strike), get your codecs setup right, download and install VLC360 or VME, and enjoy watching your favorite TV shows--commercial free--streaming from your PC to your home theatre.