personally I use my xbox 360’s as Media Center Extenders, one wired and the other with the wireless network adapter and both work flawlessly. I’m not sure about the flaky problems you seem to have with your wireless network adapter, maybe poor reception? I use 802.11g (don’t have an 802.11a device yet….) and it is ony about 15 feet away from the router and works great. I find it most useful for watching/pausing/rewinding live TV as well as playing my library of music and videos. Media Center rocks! Its soo easy to use the interface is pleasant and easy to understand, my girlfriend uses it with no problems (and she’s not the most tech savvy person i’ve ever met). I dunno what i’d do without my 360. cry perhaps??

Quote “TVersity offers a much more robust solution for sharing multimedia from your network or directly from feeds on the Internet. It even supports sharing media that is not compatible with the Xbox 360 console directly. It can be used over a normal wired network or a wireless network”

Link: http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/stream_video_xbox_360_tversity.cfm

Enjoy!

http://www.psynixis.com/blog/2007/11/07/top-5-tips-for-setting-up-your-xbox-360-to-stream-media/

which I will try to keep up-to-date.

The new DivX/XviD support does indeed work great, although it doesn’t work with the Zune player software. I use Windows Media Player sharing services for streaming DivX/XviD videos, and Zune Player sharing for the rest. It’s a pity that Microsoft can’t share all video formats from a single piece of PC software; as I understand it, they are legally prevented from doing this as a result of anti-trust issues. However, the Xbox 360 software makes it easy to switch between services.

If you’ve been using the Media Centre Extender, then yes, you’ll find the Zune Player supports many more types of file. Typically, if the file extensions are: .mp4, .m4v, mp4v, or .mov, you can stream it from Zune Player.

Zune, MCE PC and 360 are the best way to go. Plus you can stream HD content via HDMI (don’t know if you can or can’t witth apple tv) good info though

As far as wireless security goes, I have no idea. Mine is wired. However, the wireless adapter from MS has received an enormous amount of praise. You notice there aren’t many, if any, 2nd party wireless adapters. You simply can’t beat the size, performance and price of what MS offers on this product (a little unusual I know).

So the Zune softward lets you stream more video types than MCE? Or at least that’s what you are saying. I use MCE right now and it’s very limited. I think I’ll download Zune’s software and give it a try.

You should update this post.

PS MacMini should be fine exporting, but if you find you’re using the MacMini for more things you can add a hardware USB 2 h.264 encoder to turbocharge your exports..

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_turbo264

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetv250na

The only problem is: problems with mismatching screen resolutions abound (computers tend to output resolutions that aren’t a 1:1 match with TV screens). So, I’d need to make sure I understand how to get around those issues (if they exist) on the Mac. And, I’d need to check that Front Row plays all the video formats I want.

However, aside from the lack of XviD support, I have to say that the Xbox 360 makes a pretty nice media streamer.