…To MacBook

I was looking for a good way to stream my MP3s and Videos from my itunes to my xbox 360. The xbox talks about connecting to a media pc on your local system and there was no obvious way of connecting the xbox to my mac, until I found Nullriver’s Connect 360. I first downloaded their trial version from here. Installation was a breeze, just unzip the file and then double click on the “Connect360.prefPane” file and connect 360 gets installed in your System Preferences pane under the “Other” section:

Preferences Pane with Connect 360 installed

Once you open the Connect 360 preference, all you have to do is click the “Start” button and it will index your iTunes content and make it available for xbox 360. You will then see your computer’s name come up on the 360 when you go to the music or video library.

I didn’t even have to think about going to the site and paying the $20 fee to nullriver. It was so easy to install, so easy to get started and when I played some of the MP3s on the 360 and saw how well it worked I immediately bought a key to activate the full version. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has a mac and an xbox 360.

I recently heard about, and installed Understudy; an open source plugin for Front Row that allows access to streamin media. It currently supports Netflix streaming and Hulu. I don’t really care about Hulu but I do have a netflix account and I already use netflix to watch movies on my xbox. Installing front row was straight forward but once in the front row interface, it was a little tricky to get used to the operation of the plugin.

First you need to go into the understudy category and add new feed. From the netflix menu you can add different categories like the most popular list of all time, the newest movies avaqilable to watch instantly, most popular last week and so on. You need to open safari before loading front row and you need to be logged into your netflix account. In true front row fashion the list shows up on the right and a thumbnail with a description of the movie on the left.

What I like about the plugin is the clean interface of front row to browse the movies. I also like the fact that I can browse list of movies especially the latest additions to the instant system. The code seems to work fine without any problems.

My gripe though is that I need to open safari, go to netflix.com, log in and then open front row. If I need to do all that then why not just continue using safari? I wish this plugin had an area where I could put my username and password and it would log into netflix wihtout the need to start safari. The other issue is that my own movie queue does not show up which is available on the xbox version. Both the xbox and understudy have no way of searching the netflix library and you are pretty much stuck just using the lists that are available. It’s a little ahead of the xbox because of the ability to browse some lists at least whereas the xbox only has your queue. To watch anything on the xbox you need to first log into your account on a computer, find the movie and add it to your queue.

Even though it’s missing some of the features that I’d like to see, understudy is in it’s infancy and is a great step forward in streaming movies on front row. I encourage mac users to download the plugin.