So just wondeirng if anybody out there has managed to hook up their xbox either to a portable hardrive or there PC so they can watch tv shows/movies etc. on their xbox????

yes mate ... you either need Windows XP Media Centre Edition or Vista
then you set it up using the media centre buttons on each console.. there are steps to do it on both the XBOX 360 and the PC.

but you HAVE to have either one of those Operating Systems unfortunatly.
Its great when its up and running though...

Yeah thats what I thought, u have to pay for that fuking media centre aswell....

... Haha, prehaps not...

Damn didn't realise that this media centre shinanigins was a complete new operating system.... Pain in the ass....

if your pc can run media centre,i recommend getting a copy. i can now just stream films from the pc upstairs through to the 360 downstairs to watch on the big tv. i can even watch divx by using a programme called transcode 360. i'm no pc whizz,but managed to get it all running

Yeah I stream via wireless also, i have a ps3 & 360 and between them you can stream pretty much anything. It's awesome being able to actually use a hdtv properly, streaming high def content to it via the pc

For 360 the wmv-hd stuff you can get is really good.

I mostly use vista and and tversity, and mkv2vob.

Or you could try putting your movie on to a usb pen and sticking that into your 360

Thanks for that cypher, am going to, I have a portable hardrive but its not formatted right so am just going to get a 1gig USB stick or sumthing and just watch things off that

No problem mate, be aware tho that the 360 is a fussy bastard about what video formats it'll play.

I have my pc hooked up to my hd tv so I generally just watch my downloaded films directly from my hard drive without having to piss about with the 360, although the picture is a bit better through the 360. I also sometimes watch films from my video mp3 player plugged directly into my tv as again the picture is a bit better, but again the mp3 player is also a fussy bastard about formats.

Ive spent the last couple of weeks messing with this and with media centre its a nightmare, shite, slow and buggy and a right pain in the arse.

What you want, is TVersity, which is a piece of piss to setup and works with everything ive threw at it so far.

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/st...sity_page_3.cfm

I know a lot of people don't like Windows Media Player, but version 11 has a function where you can share movies, music and pictures to your 360. You don't need media player running to do this, apart from when setting up which files you want to share, just the background process.
I've been using it for a while and it works well for me.

the formatting thing is a pain in the arse. it has to be in FAT/FAT32 for the 360 to read it. most drives nowadays are NTFS. also you can only format upto 120gig in FAT32. so if your drives bigger you have to partition it [which defeats the object of a big gig HDD]

Anyways, i got a 500gig portable hard drive that i store music films photos ect on but the 360 couldnt read it. so i got my computer geek of a brother to have a look. he managed to format the whole 500gig in FAT32 via some help from the internet. so now i simply plug in the harddrive n play my entire music collection or watch films [AVI] from that.

its also good as the sound is excellent through xbox n my dolby 5.1 surround sound system via the toslink[optical] cable.

the beauty of playing straight off a portable hard drive is you DONT need the any media players either.

of course the simple & cheap way is to get a USB stick

i can also stream from my pc if i need to. but its a pain as the pc needs to be on.

peace all