My new Xbox 360 came in last week, and I have been spending a lot of time fiddling with it.This is my first game console because I don't have a powerful desktop to play games anymore. My laptop is my primary computer. Adding the xBox has got me thinking about a proper home network. I want to be able to play all the media on my laptop on the HD TV, through the Xbox.  I'm looking at power line networkingand the cheaper option of adding a second wireless router with WDS.

I'm connecting the console through my laptop using ICS temporarily, which involves taking my laptop downstairs every time I need to get on Xbox Live. I set up the Xbox as an extender to Windows Media Center (WMC) on the laptop. 

Windows Media player will play divx videos and HD videos in mkv files after installing the correct codecs . However, WMC will not play these by default. A registry hack will fix this.

The xbox doesn't  have the codecs to play the above formats even though it is streamed from WMC. The video should be transcoded to a format that can be played on the xbox usually wmv. Good if there was a way to download codecs from the Xbox live market place.

This is where a nice little tool called Transcode360 helps. Transcode360 adds an extra menu item on WMC to convert the video. This shows up on the Xbox media center too.

Clicking on this starts the transcoding process on the computer running WMC. Give it a few minutes ( more for larger files) and the video is ready to watch on the Xbox it all its 720 high def glory.

I'm a big fan of flight sims, and I'm looking forward to playing Ace Combat 6 when it's out next week. The demo is pretty cool. Wish there was Flight Simulator on the Xbox. I've got Forza Motor Sport 2 and Ghost Recon 2 to start me off.