Home Media Dream: Xbox 360 and Mac Kiss and Make Up

My inner geek came out on the weekend and I finally cracked what had been annoying me for ages: how to share video content between my Mac-based home network and the Xbox 360. I was quasi-excited when Apple announced the Apple TV until, like every other Australian, I soon realised that there was no movie or TV content I could download from iTunes Australia. OK - can't wait to buy that brick and connect it to the TV and.. look at my photos.

I've hoped for a while that the Xbox 360 would eventually be our WiFi-ed video receiver because i don't really want to stack up any more boxes next to the TV. But of course the Xbox video marketplace shows no sign of launching here either. Sigh. Can you say 'backwater'?

And of course, although the Xbox is a Media Centre extender, i) We only have Macs and ii) Most of the videos we have are Quicktime or DivX. But there had to be a way - and thankfully, it's finally happened.

Connect 360 is a great piece of software that allows Macs to share iLife stuff photos, iTunes Library etc with a 360. Just recently they've added video - yes! But only Windows Media (WMV, WMA) - no! So still no DivX piping through the house.

But a little searching and I found a very neat little app called VisualHub which can convert nearly anything to anything.

So.. I'm there. The videos come down the pipe, land in a shared folder (accessible to all devices in the house), are converted by a script into WMV and are instantly available to be streamed when we turn on the Xbox 360. Nirvana!