I put A/V systems in all 3 offices for an orthodontist about 9 years ago and it's time for an upgrade. He wants flat screens w/movies and X360 at each station. Anyone done this or know where I might research it. My dentist has the movies so I'll give him a call as well. It appears that it's probably a type of Windows Media Center from a central hard drive.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

REMOTE CONTROL> the premium package comes with a small remote, but I think that you have to buy the accessory remote control to get the full featured model.

NETWORK> MS sells a USB wireless 802.11g adapter as an accessory, but I'd recommend using a wired connection, especially as network traffic goes up with multiple video streams and / or XBox live gaming.

SERVER> with a Windows Media Center installed, each XBox console can act as a Media Center extender. Establishing static IPs, domains, etc... and it is pretty much as close to plug and play as you can make a server - client setup. If you are really concerned about availability, you should look at making the MCE a real server vs a typical desktop... multiple uplinks to the network for higher availability and max data throughput, which could just mean adding 1 or more ethernet adapters to a desktop machine. the hard drives should be server class too, in a perfect world, with a controller designed for file serving and RAID redundancy. if your not computer savvy, perhaps just stick with what you get out of the box and see if it works, especially if the number of XBox stations will be relatively low.

Will the movies be played as DVD's in each room/xbox 360?
The Xbox 360 in extender mode will not allow movies that have been ripped to a MCE2005 computer to be streamed, the old application that worked with the original xbox allowed this but the 360 and mce2005 will not.
Only prerecorded HDTV, WMVHD trailers and some VMVHD movies will allow for streaming from the main mce2005.
There may be a "Blade" added this year that will allow a Direct TV MPEG 4 PVR to be linked to a MCE2005 and xbox 360's would be able to stream both recorded content and on demand shows.
I am presenting a seminar at EHX next Thursday on theintegration of XBOX 360, that address the st up of 360"s in much more detail!

Andrew

Andrew could you give more details on that presentation. I'll be at the Expo next week.

You might also consider Media Center boot Camp if you have Wed. to spare.

by the way, I emailed you about a story scheduled for May CE Pro that features one of Andrew's installations -- an Xbox grabbing content (photos and audio) from an XP computer and distributing throughout the house. You'll need an MCE to stream any video (not from the DVD drive, though, as andrew mentions.)

xbox has mpeg-2 encoder, so mce can act as file server while Xbox focuses on decoding and playback, so less stuttering than may occur from MCE directly.

Thanks Julie. I'm getting there Wednesday night.

Julie I replied to your e-mail and got an undeliverable message back:


I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
[email protected]: relaying mail to comcast.net is not allowed.

Please send me that info. Thanks.

Thanks for the replies. I get the impression that to make something like this work at present there are quite a few tweaks, do's, don'ts, can'ts and maybe's.

Am I off the track here?

The biggest hangup now is getting a commercial DVD "image" to be served from MCE to an MCE client (or an X-Box). It "can" be done now, but is something best tackled by a hobbyist.

For a doctor's office, worst case what, he has to play a video tape or capture video from a DVD player, stripping off macrovision with a TBC or sync regenerator or something to rerun the same handful of friggin movies over and over? Just explain this one issue with him, and as a professional law abiding entity, it just isn't really in your court but to install the equipment as the manufacturer intends.

as far as non-DVD, hard drive served media, local DVD playback, XBox live gaming, etc... that seems pretty simple as it is intended for non-professionals to set up themselves.