Tallitsch

I was researching connecting my ReplayTV unit up to my Comcast set-top control box and ran across the site for this $180 device. Because it is very cool I had to do a write up about it. We have a bunch of devices attached to the TV to play games and watch movies. We have the Xbox, which also works through the Windows 7 media player to access our NAS which has movies stored on it. Then there is the OSD, which also access the NAS directly, and we have the Roku for streaming Netflix’s. The OSD is an ok device, but is temperamental sometimes when it comes to playback. Watching movies through the Xbox is also a pain due to having to have the Windows7 computer turned on and then having to use that crazy game pad to make the movie play. I love the Roku for its ease of use and how well it works, but it does not access anything other then Netflix online. This SageTV device looks like a Roku, but will access all kinds of video and audio formats from NAS, or networked shared PC, much more then the OSD. It does even more with additional software, making this a DVR and allows you to remotely access you movies from anywhere you have internet access. If someone wants me to test this out, just send me one or the $180 and I will perform extensive testing with it and write up my findings.

So seeing that I am a MS Certified Partner, I get some cool software to mess around with. I decided to try and get a Windows 7 BetaOS to work with my Xbox 360 so that I could watch movies stored on the NAS. Using the Windows Media Center and the Media extender for Xbox, I got all that working together without too many problems. I did get some BSOD, but I think it had to do with either my video card or the NIC. After an update the OS seems to be working well. I did find that AVI’s work well as do Divx. You do have to download the divx player to install the necessary codex for that all to work, both on the Windows machine and the Xbox itself. The only issue I have is with MP4 and that is frame dropping. I found a web site that explains it better HERE. In short it has to do with Zune compatibility and videos need to be between 23-29 fps. 

I have now rebuilt my Window 7 box and am again testing it with my Xbox 360 and NAS playing music(mp3), avi and dvix videos. So far it seems to be working just fine. I did need to install Divx on the Win 7 computer along with DivX Tech Preview. This I got from the DivX site. There is also a very nice video on the DivX site explaining all this. I found other methods that are out on the Internet that say they can do the same thing, do not work with Windows 7.