I have my Dad and his wife coming to town this weekend so I have to get my demos ready. When people visit you need to trot out the toys and show off the "home of the future." It comes with the territory.
This inevitably leads to glitches and uncomfortable pauses, but I think I'm ready this time.
I set up my XBox 360 to front end my Media Center PC. You can select the "little green button" in the 360 console and your Media Center will load. The entire UI is there, including your TV shows. You have to download a Windows Media Connect add-on and some stuff but the process is pretty straightforward.
However, I did notice a few things. One is picture quality. When viewing stills I am seeing some compression or some distortion. Very slight but on a 56" HD you notice. Also, it seems like a bit of a hassle to listen to music or look at photos. Why not just use the built in image viewer and music player in the 360? It sees the same PC anyway.
The big gain here is being able to to watch TV "through" your 360, so you have one sleek console instead of a mammoth tower. I imagine I will upgrade the MCE to a cable card/Vista box in early 2007.
Perhaps then I will be ready for demos.
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