Mike Agerbo: Today we’re going to show you how to turn your Xbox 360 console into more than a gaming machine, an actual media center extender.
AJ Vickery: And that’s a great option because what that’s going to do is it can allow you to take something that traditionally your family will use to play videogames and turn it into something that you cannot only just watch movies but also do things that record television line.
Mike Agerbo: Well this is a kind of a cool thing and it works in conjunction with one of the computers in your house. What we’re going to do today is set it up with a Windows 07 laptop. Basically, Widows 07, even Windows Vista, most of the versions of it comes with the windows media center and I’ll show you. We basically go into the start menu, and this is a media center interface that allows you to access all of your videos, your pictures and your music as well. And in some cases if you’ve got a TV tuner card plug into your laptop or your desktop computer, you can also watch and record TV shows as well. So it’s pretty simple to set up. You go to the task section in windows media center and you can see right here on the end add extender. Simply by going in there I just follow the wizard, I hit next and what we want to do now on the Xbox is set it up here as well.
We want to go to the ‘my Xbox’ section and we’ll keep going down to the media center, there, and click on that, and continue.
So you take that number and you plug it in to the set up screen here. What it's essentially doing is creating a connection between this computer and the Xbox 360.
JV Vickery: And what it’s doing is it’s actually using the home network allowing these two devices to talk to each other. So our Xbox 360 is now talking to our computer whether it’s in the bedroom, up in the office or even in the same as the living room, those two can talk to each other through our home network.
In this case here we’ve kind of condensed our home network just to kind of show you how it’s done. We’ve got it hard wired, so we’ve got internet cable going from the laptop into the router and from the router into the Xbox 360. So we’re going to hit next here, what it’s doing here is configuring the extender and the computer. It’s searching for it out on the network and this typically will take a few minutes as it goes through the checklist.
Mike Agerbo: How easy was that?
JV Vickery: Really easy and just so we know or looking art here. This is now the media center interface that was on our computer through the 360 now on our television set and again giving us tons of different options.
Mike Agerbo: To make the TV section work you do have to have a TV tuner card in the computer that is being connected to. Once you’ve done that you can actually watch live TV, pause live TV and you record it too which is kind of a cool feature. You know going up to the pictures and videos there, let’s go up there a bit. Going to the picture library, these are basically pictures that are coming off of, so its updating libraries that are coming out of the actual computer and again remember at anytime we can add additional network computers for the Xbox 360 to look at. Of course you pick your picture.
JV Vickery: Yeah, I did, yeah. But you know I'm here. Now we’re looking at the photos on our computer system that’s up in our office on our television downstairs which is really rare. You want to be able to look at these kinds of things.
Mike Agerbo: So it’s important to know that the computer has to be on for this interface to work. if you turn your laptop or desktop that you’ve got it connected to off, the media center interface won’t work but again a wonderful opportunity to give some extra functionality to your video game console and create a whole other media center and in the family rook for the kids.
Let me show you a slide show that we’ve put together. Cool.
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