Today I have been mostly playing with My Movies for MCE 2005.

This little toy allows you to index (including details from IMDB), and rip your DVD collection to your MCE PC so you do not have to go digging around for the disks every time you want to watch a flick (it also integrated with DVD Profiler!).

If you want it to work with the 360 as an extender then you have to add the mcx1 user account to the local admins group on the MCE PC.

I’ve just discovered the Newsgator plugin for XP Media Center Edition! It’s great and works fine through the 360 as an extender, I highly recommend you download it now.

What? I thought the days of really horrible setup programs where gone! Yes the product is in ‘beta’ but no 360 owner should have to go through this sort of pain to get a game running, after all Live works so well, why must PlayOnline get in the way?

Even after you have gone through the registration pain of PlayOnline it takes 50 minutes for it to install the actual game!

Square Enix REALLY have to sort this all out before release or people will not buy it, we have unfortunatly got used to Live.

Righty oh’ then all setup with media center (I’ve gone a bit further and knocked something up for media server on server 2003 but more of that in a later post). You may however have noticed that the OneCare firewall does not play well (or if you could not connect at all this is probably why).

Here’s whats needed to get it all working…..

1. Open up OneCare and head for the view or change settings option
2. Select firewall then advanced
3. Click the add button and add these 3 applications (usually found in \windows\ehome) MCXNetTw.exe, MCRMgr.exe and Ehexthost.exe
4. Click the ports and protocols tab
5. Add the following items (all local subnet and inbound only)
   TCP 5555 and UDP 7777 are required for the ehshell.exe
   UDP 3776 is required for Mcrdsvc.exe
   TCP 3390 and UDP 1900 are required for Svchost.exe
6. You should therefore now have 3 trusted applications and 5 listening ports allowed in your firewall

You should (with a little luck) now be able to connect your 360 up to the media center and still have the firewall enabled.

Well my foray into Vista MCE has sort of hit a stand still, seems the latest vista CTP will not allow the extender software to run, just complains it needs MCE 2005 (the last CTP worked fine).

Therefore I have setup my MCE 2005 to ’stream’ XVid and DivX to my 360. If you want to know how to setup the 360 to accept the streamed version of a XVid/DivX then hop over here as he has a great write up on the subject.

One thing to make sure about is that for us Europeans we need to set the video profile up as PAL, that way the Media Center PC does NTSC to PAL conversion if need be. The other thing I would recommend is that you use the Media Center remote control rather than a XBox 360 wireless controller, as when the controller turns itself off the display goes a little odd (icons over the video in the background).

I’ve also been playing with WMV HD (the Terminator 2 disk as well as some downloads) and they look GREAT! but they don’t half hammer the wireless connection.

Using the 360 as a MCE device is good, no really it is! I have however decided to give the Vista version of Media Center a go through it, I’m still playing (using the December CTP) however one thing you will need to get is the correct download of the 360 media center connect software. Unfortunately the Xbox.com website does not understand Vista and complains that you should install XP/XP MCE.

You can get round this by visiting the manual download page and just downloading the XP MCE 2005 UR2 version of the software.

More information when I’ve done playing

As mentioned before the ‘announced’ chip by an as yet unknown setup has been commented about by the TeamXecuter team (original post copied here)

There has been much hype surrounding a possible 360 chip that was allegedly tested by just one mod retailer (who has absolutely no real influence in the scene - so that’s suspicious to start with). We’ve kinda kept quiet on this one due to the fact that at least one other mod chip maker had been trying to do “business” with them so we wanted to see how it played out.

There has been no picture or video evidence and no technical information - again very strange and suspicious. In the past all major mod teams including ourselves and Xenium and SmartXX always gave something real to chew on before a release.

First this site shows a picture of a mod - which is blatantly bullshit. Looked like some pic emulator board (later found to be true)

Then they say sorry as its a fake picture !?!

Then they post a picture of a bios config screen similar to what you’d see with X3 Config Live and others) but they say they aren’t doing any unsigned code hacking ?!?

Now we hear this from Divineo…

“The 360 chip is 99% a scam, we had booked tickets to go meet them, we were ready to make huge prepayment and more after we meet the guys at their office and see the working X-Box 360 with back-ups they 100% confirmed they had and it was no problem to show etc. Now at last second they cancelled, with some lame reason, those guys are scammers I really believe. They did the same to Xenium, backed off and changed completely what they said.”

Our point of view is that this is not real, or possibly they had some success but discovered some new security structure in the 360 and are scratching their heads but of course posted the news too quickly.

If this was ever real they would first go to someone like Xbox-Scene with a demo and then of course Divineo, not some website shop that no one has ever heard of -especially for something that would be such a huge breakthrough.

All we say to the scene is don’t go putting too much credence (or funds for that matter) into anything that isn’t proven as real. We can assure you there will be more than one type of mod available from different groups in the coming weeks/months - just be patient.

Now I’m sure a modchip will show-up soon, but if your expecting an XBox style ‘run everything’ chip then for a while (if ever) I think your plum out of luck.

There is a know issue in the recently release DOA4, sometimes it does not save your gamer information (unlocked characters and achievements). This is being sorted in a patch but for now…..

1. Turn on XBox without disk in the drive
2. Wait for the XBox to sign into Live
3. Insert disk

Most people will probably do it that way anyhow, but the warning is there, don’t boot straight into DOA4.

A funny comment from Richard Huddy (European Developer Relations), Huddy recalls how, “as [he] understands it,” Sony went to Nvidia very late in the development cycle and they delivered was a modified 7800GTX - which “is a pretty powerful piece of hardware,” he notes, “but not very elegant…Xbox 360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a pretty healthy margin in the long run.”.

Amusing, I do believe the PS3 will be powerful, it will be pretty as Sony cannot afford it to not be! However I think they have missed a trick not having a Live competitor for the new platform.

Now Microsoft have to just prove how good the ATI setup inside the 360 is by sorting the DVD playback out, it is truly shocking, but hey…..

Pop over to Joystiq for the whole story.

Has gone Gold! Yipee!

Tecmo have anounced that it has shipped, so with some luck we should have it before 2006 (if the shops are open near you that is).