Netflix / Hulu / Youtube >>> Xbox 360 Now!

[Lord Helmet]

http://www.themediamall.com/playon

 

Install PlayOn on your PC (windows xp or vista). Once you give it your netflix id and password, you can stream a ton of content to your 360. Took me 5 minutes to set everything up (including the install).

 

Works GREAT!!!

 

Trial is for 45 days, then its 30 bucks to buy.

[Hyper_Eye]

I suppose this could be worth using until the Netflix support arrives for 360. Anyone with Media Center can do this already for free: http://lifehacker.com/396881/turn-your-xbo...-netflix-player

 

I currently use fuppes to stream content to my 360 since it works on Linux. I suppose I will see if this software works in a virtual machine.

[moycon]

Awesome. I'll use this until the Netflix deal goes through this fall.

[S1500]

How good & easy to config is fuppes? I stream from the linux box to my 360, and it tops out at 500 tracks, and is very flakey.

[Lord Helmet]

I don't have a gold account, and the Hulu support is pretty cool as well. This is just another option for people wanting to get media to their 360.

 

I was actually pretty surprised at how well this works.

Edited October 5, 2008 by Lord Helmet

[moycon]

Tried this out tonight.

Very cool. As far as I can tell it adds the movies that are available for instant viewing that our in your queue to the Xbox dashboard? I had 19 flicks available. Right now I have on Frankensteins Castle of Freaks!

The picture on my HDTV was a far cry from HD disk and upconverted standard DVD I was used to but certainly and easily watchable.

I wasn't crazy about entering my unsername and password for Netflix, but since the credit card attached to my account is now expired I guess I don't mind. When Netflix asks for a new credit card I will change the password.

In the mean time this is great, but ultimately something I wont really need long since I have a Gold account and a Netflix account and will be able to stream Netflix movies for free in a few weeks.

 

EDIT : Some more notes about this. I don't know what Hulu is but it appears to have lots and lots of cool movies available with a tag stating they have limited commercials. I'm not sure yet if these are uncut but I expect they are. There were several other media options as well. Checking them out now. One thing to anyone that tries this out. Especially if you have your 360 connected wireless. If you press a button to watch a flick and it returns an error...don't give up. Just press the A button again. In some cases (probably depending on the length and quality of the video) you may have to hit the A button a 3rd time. Eventually the screen will stay black and a buffer will appear at the top of the screen. Once it hits 100% the flick will start. The entire process might take you 30 seconds. A small price to pay for a full length uncut movie. I may wind up paying the $30 yet. If only for the Hulu and YouTube.

 

I have a feeling my girlfriend is really going to dig this.

Edited October 5, 2008 by moycon

[Hyper_Eye]

Well, I got this software working in a virtual machine. It took a little work as I had to setup an ethernet bridge so that Windows could pull an IP address from the router instead of using NAT from the virtual machine but once I got it bridged my 360 was able to see it. It streamed Netflix movies alright. Unfortunately the movie froze up near the end and I found that trying to resume the movie actually started it back at the beginning. The software does not support fast-forwarding or rewinding the movie so there was no way to get back to where it froze. So it could use some work.

 

I think I will stick with using fuppes to stream content natively in Linux and wait for the Netflix support to be added to 360. It was fun getting it to work anyway.

 

How good & easy to config is fuppes? I stream from the linux box to my 360, and it tops out at 500 tracks, and is very flakey.

 

Fuppes has really come along. There are a few pitfalls in setting it up for 360 but with a few configuration changes it works great. Unfortunately, finding the needed changes is a bit of a pain because they are scattered about and some of them are also preference. I have had it stall on videos from time to time but I can just rewind the video a little and it will pick back up. I have roughly 10,000 songs and they are all listed. If you decide to give it a shot let me know and I will PM you my configs so that you can get up and running hassle free.

 

It certainly works better then x360mediaserv and it is better then paying for TwonkeyVision. Free is always better in my book. Open source puts a cherry on top.

Edited October 5, 2008 by Hyper_Eye

[S1500]

I can't even get fuppes to compile. God dammit. Of course, trying to make sense of the error messages & such just talks, but doesn't say anything.

[Hyper_Eye]

I can't even get fuppes to compile. God dammit. Of course, trying to make sense of the error messages & such just talks, but doesn't say anything.

 

I'm a programmer. I can make sense of them. Are you compiling from SVN?

[rsiddall]

http://www.themediamall.com/playon

 

Install PlayOn on your PC (windows xp or vista). Once you give it your netflix id and password, you can stream a ton of content to your 360. Took me 5 minutes to set everything up (including the install).

 

Works GREAT!!!

 

Trial is for 45 days, then its 30 bucks to buy.

 

TVersity is free and can be found here. Easy to set up and I think the interface is fairly easy to use.

Plus you can create buttons for user generated content so it can do what PlayOn offers and more. Not sure about a Netflix option (don't have an account anyway) but like others have mentioned, the 360 will have this option later this year. Free vs. $30 is hard to beat if you don't have XP Media Center.

[rsiddall]

Here are some free HD programming links. ABC is listed along with NBC and CBS.

[NE146]

Once you give it your netflix id and password

What if you don't have a Netflix account?

Edited October 6, 2008 by NE146

[rsiddall]

Once you give it your netflix id and password

What if you don't have a Netflix account?

 

Don't need one to use either of these services...you can still access the other channels like YouTube and Hulu among others.

[+remowilliams]

Tried out Playon yesterday and it worked incredibly well. It needs more features though like FF/REW working to be a commercial product.

 

I also tried vmcNetflix but it was buggy as hell with a bunch of issues, then eventually gave up working completely. Got uninstalled pretty fast.

 

Netflix to the 360 is so very, very cool. Can't wait.

[S1500]

I can't even get fuppes to compile. God dammit. Of course, trying to make sense of the error messages & such just talks, but doesn't say anything.

 

I'm a programmer. I can make sense of them. Are you compiling from SVN?

 

I wasn't compiling from the SVN. It was just a straight download from the website. Did the expected ./configure and it stopped at when it was testing gcc. It was expecting an output file and didn't find it, thus aborting everything.

 

When I get back home, I'll post what it hath outputted. It's about 20 or so lines in. This is on the latest rev of Ubuntu.

[S1500]

Okay, here's the config.log. It appears that I can't compile jack squat.

config.txt

[S1500]

I got a bit further in the 20000000 step process of the install. It now bitches on sqlite3 not being installed, but here's the funny kicker: it IS installed! Can you believe that!?? I mean lolz!@#@!#

 

It's shit like this that reminds me why Linux isn't a mainstream OS. Seriously., I know this fuppes thing doesn't owe me anything, but really, couldn't you make a nice little binary package that works out of the box? I don't want to manually install 3300 different "dev" libraries just to get one thing working.

[Hyper_Eye]

I got a bit further in the 20000000 step process of the install. It now bitches on sqlite3 not being installed, but here's the funny kicker: it IS installed! Can you believe that!?? I mean lolz!@#@!#

 

It's shit like this that reminds me why Linux isn't a mainstream OS. Seriously., I know this fuppes thing doesn't owe me anything, but really, couldn't you make a nice little binary package that works out of the box? I don't want to manually install 3300 different "dev" libraries just to get one thing working.

 

Really it's up to the distros to support binary packages. As long as different distros continue to remain binary incompatible it is not really sensible to provide binary packages. Could you imagine if everything you had installed was a statically linked binary? It would be ridiculous.

 

As far as Linux being a mainstream OS I could careless about that. It isn't as if Linux depends on it. It is open-source and free. It doesn't need 90% of the market or even 1%. For me it is exactly what I need for work and for home. I understand that some of the complications don't make sense to a lot of people but they make perfect sense to me and I understand why things happen. In Windows things happen many times for no apparent reason and no reasonable explanation is provided. That just doesn't suit my needs.

 

For me the install process was four steps. I made sure my dependencies were installed, configured the source, compiled it, installed it. I don't use Ubuntu though. There is a post on the Ubuntu forum about compiling from SVN on Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=597650

 

I compiled from SVN. I generally like to have the latest code. Sometimes I find bugs in software and submit patches and they have to be against the latest SVN.

[S1500]

I'll give the above-mentioned link a try. I may have seen that last night, but got sidetracked installing all the required packages to satisfy the compiler script. Thanks.

[S1500]

Well, I've gotten a wee bit further. I got past .configure & make install, but it won't run upon executing "fuppes":

 

"fuppes: error while loading shared libraries: libfuppes.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

 

Ugh. Something didn't compile right.

[rsiddall]

Has anyone tried MyCastOrb? It's free and is fairly easy to setup. Runs on Windows machines and will stream videos to Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, mobile phones, etc.

Located here: http://www.orb.com/

[S1500]

After much toiling & trouble, I got it to work last night. Wherever you see the xbox declaration line & false(which showed up in a few places), turn them to True. Things suddenly start to work. A good deal of AVI files won't work, but I assume that is expected due to codecs.

[Hyper_Eye]

After much toiling & trouble, I got it to work last night. Wherever you see the xbox declaration line & false(which showed up in a few places), turn them to True. Things suddenly start to work. A good deal of AVI files won't work, but I assume that is expected due to codecs.

 

I haven't had any videos not work yet. But I had to work a bit in the configuration files as some settings required changing for the 360. That's why I said to let me know when you were ready for configs so I could provide you the changes I had to make. Let me know if you want them.

[S1500]

After much toiling & trouble, I got it to work last night. Wherever you see the xbox declaration line & false(which showed up in a few places), turn them to True. Things suddenly start to work. A good deal of AVI files won't work, but I assume that is expected due to codecs.

 

I haven't had any videos not work yet. But I had to work a bit in the configuration files as some settings required changing for the 360. That's why I said to let me know when you were ready for configs so I could provide you the changes I had to make. Let me know if you want them.

 

I'm curious about the transcoding stuff. With the xbox update, I'm assuming the xbox update as of recent, the "transcoding" is not necessary. still a bit confused about that part.

[Hyper_Eye]

After much toiling & trouble, I got it to work last night. Wherever you see the xbox declaration line & false(which showed up in a few places), turn them to True. Things suddenly start to work. A good deal of AVI files won't work, but I assume that is expected due to codecs.

 

I haven't had any videos not work yet. But I had to work a bit in the configuration files as some settings required changing for the 360. That's why I said to let me know when you were ready for configs so I could provide you the changes I had to make. Let me know if you want them.

 

I'm curious about the transcoding stuff. With the xbox update, I'm assuming the xbox update as of recent, the "transcoding" is not necessary. still a bit confused about that part.

 

Transcoding is no longer necessary and I don't even have it enabled. I had to make some changes in both the fuppes.cfg and the vfolder.cfg:

 

360 section in fuppes.cfg

	<device name="Xbox 360" virtual="Xbox 360" enabled="true">
  <user_agent>Xbox/2.0.\d+.\d+ UPnP/1.0 Xbox/2.0.\d+.\d+</user_agent>
  <user_agent>Xenon</user_agent>
  <xbox360>true</xbox360>
  <show_empty_resolution>true</show_empty_resolution>
  <description_values>
	<friendly_name>%s %v : 1 : Windows Media Connect</friendly_name>
	<model_name>Windows Media Connect compatible (%s)</model_name>
	<model_number>2.0</model_number>
  </description_values>
  <file_settings>
	 <file ext="mp3"><type>AUDIO_ITEM_MUSIC_TRACK</type></file>
	 <file ext="jpg"><type>IMAGE_ITEM_PHOTO</type></file>
	 <file ext="avi"><type>VIDEO_ITEM</type>
	   <mime_type>video/avi</mime_type>
	 </file>
  </file_settings>
</device>

 

360 section in vfolder.cfg

  <vfolder_layout device="Xbox 360" enabled="true" create_references="true">

<vfolder name="Music" id="1">
  <vfolder name="Album" id="7">
	<vfolders property="album">
	  <items type="audioItem" />
	</vfolders>
  </vfolder>

  <vfolder name="All Music" id="4">
	<items type="audioItem" />
  </vfolder>

  <vfolder name="Artist" id="6">
	<vfolders property="artist">
	  <items type="audioItem" />
	</vfolders>
  </vfolder>

  <vfolder name="Folders" id="20">
	<folders filter="contains(audioItem)" />
  </vfolder>

  <vfolder name="Genre" id="5">
	<vfolders property="genre">
	  <items type="audioItem" />
	</vfolders>
  </vfolder>

  <vfolder name="Playlist" id="15" />
</vfolder>

<vfolder name="Pictures" id="3">
  <vfolder name="Album" id="13" />

  <vfolder name="All Pictures" id="11">
	<items type="imageItem" />
  </vfolder>

  <vfolder name="Date Taken" id="12" />

  <vfolder name="Folders" id="22">
	<folders filter="contains(imageItem)" />
  </vfolder>
</vfolder>

<vfolder name="Playlists" id="18">
  <vfolder name="All Playlists" id="19" />
  <vfolder name="Folders" id="23" />
</vfolder>

<vfolder name="Video" id="2">
  <vfolder name="Actor" id="10" />
  <vfolder name="Album" id="14" />
  <!--<vfolder name="All Video" id="8">-->
  <vfolder name="All Video" id="21">
	<!--<items type="videoItem" />-->
	<shared_dirs full_extend="true" />
  </vfolder>
  <!--<vfolder name="Folders" id="21">-->
	<!--<folders filter="contains(videoItem)" />-->
  <!--</vfolder>-->
  <vfolder name="Genre" id="9" />
</vfolder>
 </vfolder_layout>

 

The biggest thing here was in vfolder.cfg where I changed "All Video" from id=8 to id=21. Videos weren't working until I did that. Of course I had to add my shared folders into the shared_objects section of the fuppes.cfg as well. After that I ran fuppes and hit 'r', waited until it was done, then hit 'v', and when it was done I connected from my 360. All my music and videos work. The only thing that I don't like is that I have to refresh the listing in fuppes again when I add new content into the shared paths.