I was an early adopter with the xbox360, which means I’ve been through the whole Red Ring Of Death thing, sending my console back several times. I now seem to have a stable machine, thankfully. It also means I got the original 20Gb hard disc drive, which seems pitifully small now that you can install games to the HDD and download movies.
Microsoft are pushing the xbox360 as a home entertainment hub, which is a bit of a problem for me because of the aforementioned drive capacity. I do, however, have a load of media on my external hard drive attached to my Mac. The xbox is designed to talk to Windows Media Edition rather than Mac OS X, but there’s a handy little application that will help link the two rivals together.
Connect360 is a Mac tool that installs into the preferences pane. If your Mac and xbox360 are on the same network, wired or wireless, you can set your Mac to detect it and stream music to it. On the xbox360, just play media as normal but select your Mac as the source instead of a CD, Hard Drive or Windows Computer.
It works fairly well but, despite claims that Connect360 will convert media on the fly, not all my movies were playable on the xbox. I also found that some videos didn’t match up to their listing… that is, I’d try to play Aliens and end up with Ghostbusters for some reason. However, by quitting out of the media player and going back in seemed to fix that particular problem.
Connect360 isn’t perfect, at least not in my tests, but it does the job and is a heck of a lot cheaper than an Apple TV! If you’ve been looking for a way to get your media from Mac to living room xbox360, give it a shot.
Connect360 costs $20 (US). This is not an affiliate link.
