360 can't find PC for media streaming

[Kotatsu Neko]

And then there's Windows Media Center on the 360 as well. Why? Why do we need two official programs that seem to do the same job? Not only that, but why the hell can Windows Media Center talk to the PC when the main dashboard media player can't? Secondly, why in the living crap can I not just tell the damn thing, "C:, Downloads, Videos, the video file I want to play is HERE, play it!!!!"? Is that really so difficult? Instead all I seem to get access to is a randomly picked selection of the "My Pictures" folder and 3 Windows Vista sample video clips. I can choose "Bear", "Lake", and whatever the other one is.

I agree it's a bit odd how there are two ways to stream media to the 360, and worse, if you're in Media Center Extender and want to watch media from an optical disc - HD DVD or DVD -, then you have to actually quit out of Media Center completely and play it through the dashboard...!

Quite a muddle, even going as far as ensuring the Media Center and Xbox Dash interfaces are 100% different. I don't see any reason why MS couldn't have included the DVR stuff from Media Center straight into the Xbox Dash.

That said, Media Center is pretty nice on 360, better than the dash in my opinion. The interface is much cleaner, and it supports third part plug-ins. (such as transcoders, podcast agregators, web TV and radio etc)

I personally haven't had any connectivity issues with my 360, it's always popped up in Media Player and Media Center just fine. You do have to connect to both services separately, but only once as it will remember it's connections from there on. Maybe because I have a pretty simple network set-up - my 360 and PC are both wired to a router, and I just use the standard Vista Firewall and pretty lightweight anti-virus (AVG). Nothing to get in the way of the connection.

[charlesr]

I totally agree. In XBMC, you just search for network shares, they appear and you link to them. Suddenly ALL your media is readily available and it plays every single goddamn one of them properly and has an amazing picture browser/slideshow. On the 360 I tried WMP11 and it kinda worked, although some folders appeared and some didn't. No pattern. Useless. I tried Zune. Same thing. Then I tried Nero media server so I could transcode. Same problem. Tried TVersity and it killed my PC and had to do a rollback. Genius.

So the 360 hasn't been used for any media stuff. If it had done Divx etc and all region dvds I would have bought one on release.

I have nod32 antivirus and the firewall in my router.