The Museum Of Modern Thinking

One area I am rather happy with in the XBox 360 Fall Update is support for DivX / XVid. After applying the update tonight, I then attempted to play (via Media Center on the Xbox) some DivX movies I had. Much to my dismay, I kept on getting a message saying the codec was missing. After much faffing about with trying to discover the DivX codec used (for it to work on the XBox it needs to be encided with DivX 5 or higher), I hit the XBox forums.

Eventually, I found the answer in a thread, and I thought I’d post up my steps here in case it assists someone:

1. Installed Fall update (of course)
2. Installed Optional Media Update (Games blade - All Games - Optional Media Update)
3. On my PC, set up Media Sharing in Windows Media Player 11 (Library - Media Sharing…) - it recognised my 360 as being present
4. On the 360, on Media - Videos, hit X to change Source to Computer (unsurprisingly, it recognised my PC)
5. Marvel at the list of movies from PC on your 360 (not 100% if you can “go higher” in the folder tree from My Videos) - play one!

It’s rather good to be able to stream my DivX files from PC to XBox so I can watch them on a proper TV, it’s certainly something I could have done with during my recent convalescence following my (not my fault!) car crash That aside, I can now turn my laptop into a DVR with the help of a TV tuner USB stick, GB-PVR (PVR software) and an aerial splitter. I always miss a few shows that I like (My Name Is Earl, Scrubs, Dispatches, etc.), so this will be a good solution until we upgrade all the TV-related gubbins.