Streaming Video

I've been playing around with different toy's for quite sometime now. I've made a "poor man's" movie server. A true movie server will set you back alot of cash. I thought this was really cool. I've got an Xbox 360 and since it's wired into my home network and via Window's Media Center, I'm able to pull up all my media files on to my Xbox 360. Plus using a component D.A. I'm able to use the Xbox 360 in our living room and can ship it to the bedroom TV since the controller's are wireless. I use a couple of program's to take a movie off DVD and put it on my desktop. Then from there it's a piece of cake to pull up the file's on the TV.

We've been netflick's subscriber's for quite some time. Well really we can't ever seem to get a movie back to the rental place on time and those late fee's rack up. But I had heard they where trying to stream via right to thing's like blu-ray player's via the Ethernet jack. I really hadn't thought about this much till the other day I was work in a customer's house and he told me he ordered up a movie on his blu-ray player from netflick's. The price of this is already included in the "unlimited" package.

So tonight I was toying around and saw they got set up with Xbox Live. So i set it up and cued up about ten movies to the Xbox console. So far it's working great. It's hitting me at about 480P. Which is the same as DVD quality. I haven't got to check out the sound yet, to see how much they had to compress that. But this is really cool. I log on to the netflick's site and just put in what I want and about a minitue later, bam the selection is available on my 360. So now I can pull the movies off my computer and just pull up what ever we want to watch very fast.

But I have to admit after seeing a few titles on our blu-ray player, going back to a regular DVD (that's not upconverted) just isn't the same. The video on the blu-ray is amazing. I don't have the storage space to hold blu-ray's on my desktop with out compressing them.

I just thought this was pretty cool so I thought I would share it with other's. It's a cheap way to rent movies, and not even have to leave the house. Also I noticed that you can stream the movies to your computer as well. I was thinking this might be kind of nice when I'm working out of town, and the weather is bad and I can't go caching in the evening. Of course that would all depend on just how "high speed" the hotel's high speed wireless is.