Aging Consoles Find New Life As Video Streamers 255
MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 console is six years old. The Nintendo Wii is five years old, and so is the Sony PlayStation 3. All three are due for an overhaul (can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?), and while they're still popular gaming platforms, consoles are really starting to shine as streaming media centers. According to market research firm Nielsen, streaming video on game consoles is up over last year. Xbox 360 owners now use their consoles to stream video 14 percent of the time, which is almost as much as PS3 users (15 percent). But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time."
let me go home and cry some more (Score:4, Insightful)
>(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
yes, I do it daily... TF2 still rocks.
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Yeah, alas, not all of us can upgrade from our still working computers to newer ones just for the sake of gaming. Solitaire FTW!
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, alas, not all of us can upgrade from our still working computers to newer ones just for the sake of gaming.
Hell, how many PC games nowadays are just shitty console ports in the first place?
I haven't played a game that really taxes a system since the original Crysis, and my circa-2008 Q6600 gaming rig with a couple Radeon 4670's in it has been able to play anything that's come out at perfectly reasonable medium/high settings to this day.
The era of needing to upgrade every 6 months to play new computer games is dead, and it's been dead for a while now.
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You are so right - it's amazing to think I've been playing Wasteland off and on for almost 23 years. Yikes!
So after reading your post and battling a fit of nostalgia, I was lamenting that I can't play my old DOS games on my Mac without some serious tweaking to Parallels. So I did a quick search, and found Boxer [boxerapp.com]. It took me less than four minutes from finding the website to having Wasteland running in an OSX-native window.
I am in love.
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Yes. Yes, you can.
I still consider Wasteland the greatest video game of all time. Pity that Fountain of Dreams ended up so damned buggy.
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's easy, because most games these days are designed for consoles that are about as powerful as a five-year-old PC.
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Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply play older games.
A lot of "old" stuff is still perfectly playable and better than a lot of newer stuff.
Classics tend to be like that.
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Informative)
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This. A million times. I've spent more money at GOG.com in the past year than I've spent on my Xbox360 library since I've owned the system.
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:4, Insightful)
even simpler than that:
if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today? the few pc games I play anymore would be considered 'abandonware' even though they're all from this millenium. I was trying to hunt down my Monkey Island Madness CD for my 10 year old, as it came up in conversation and she expressed interest. Games don't just stop being fun because they're old, and there's a HUGE library of games out there. My kids DS plays gameboy advance games. I walk into gamestop, he uses his allowance to pick out 2-3 new (to him) games from the used GBA game bin, and he still has money left over. Or, he can get one DS game (maybe) with that same allowance. He figured out the math pretty fast.
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even simpler than that:
if a game was fun to play 5 years ago when it was new, but I never got around to playing that one, why would it not be fun today?
Dude, you obviously don't understand the NEED to get that iPhone 5 / Verizon Galaxy Nexus / Tesla Roadster.
Neither do I .
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Even if you don't buy used games, you can still save a lot of money.
PS2 games drop(ped) to around $20 each after a while (even non-Greatest Hits ones). PS3 games seem to be dropping to around that price too, though AFAIK the official Greatest Hits price is $30. (I just got my PS3 via a Black Friday deal, but had been buying various PS3 sequels & other games I likely was interested in, for $20 or less.. Best deal was a recent Fry's price match of under-$6 for Uncharted 2 GOTY edition! It was "closeou
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Games don't just stop being fun because they're old
Not 100% true. I just discovered www.abandonia.com, which is basically a collection of pre-2001 games for free. I was super excited about all the classics from my childhood on there. But when I tried to play a lot of them I just couldn't do it for more than a few minutes. Back in those days I guess we were just more accepting of bad control schemes and interfaces. Now I've been spoiled.
But yes, I do agree with your statement in general. There are quite a few old games out there that are just as fun to play
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This inability of some people to consider older games as viable is as silly as refusing to watch any movie made prior to the 90's.
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It's not silly. We're just more sensitive to aesthetics.
In the case of my boys I don't think its aesthetics. I think the real reason is marketing. Their favorite wii game right now has absolutely horrible graphics. Its a DragonballZ game where, much like the cartoon, the fight scenes are pretty much just three images repeated over, and over again. They aren't even very good images at that, but the kids like that game so much they fight over who gets to play all of the time.
I've had some luck getting them to play with older consoles, and the games are a lot cheap
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on how much you spent at the time, that would mean an LGA775, 90nm, 'Prescott' P4 at between 2.8 and 3.8GHz(stock) or a socket 745 or 939 A64 somewhere between 1.8 and 2.6GHz(stock).
Either of those would(unless you bought a really crappy motherboard, in which case it probably wasn't a gaming PC anyway) almost certainly have had a 16x PCIe slot, so they would be fully compatible with almost any video card released in the last six years. If you bought in 2005, a GeForce 6800 or RADEON X800/X850 would have been available, if not necessarily inexpensive. Either of those would happily enough play F.E.A.R. or CoD2 at 1280x1024 at 30FPS, and those were considered comparatively intensive games for their time.
Actually kitting your 2005 system out with 4GB of RAM would probably have been too rich for most buyer's blood; with one or two being more likely; but most motherboards of the era(again, omitting cut-down junk that would never have been gaming, even at the time) should have 4 DDR2 slots, making an upgrade to an adequate-for-most-games 3 or 4GB quite cheap assuming your original configuration was 2x512 or 2x1GB.
Sounds totally doable to me, even if you aren't a retro-gaming enthusiast...
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Even if you had only 2 RAM slots, a 2x4GB upgrade is only $40 or so these days.
Of course, in my case I'm OS-limited (I went ahead and got 8GB when replacing my motherboard and therefore going DDR2->DDR3, but I still use Windows XP 32-bit so the OS only "sees" 3GB of it).
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So does my Commodore 64. I was playing a game just last night.
Re:let me go home and cry some more (Score:4, Interesting)
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Do high end graphics, sound, etc. really make gaming more enjoyable?
Yes. It's called immersion. Sure, games can be immersive without these things, but they sure do help, and once you've experienced them in newer games it's difficult to go backwards. And it's not just the graphics and sound, but also things like control schemes and "polish". Try playing GTA4 and GTA3 back to back. GTA3 was more fun, but I'm not sure I could tolerate it after seeing the production and experiencing the evolution that was GTA4.
Then again, there's very few games I'd play more than once, any
No wonder (Score:2)
Power (Score:5, Informative)
No wonder that set-top boxes don't sell.
The bad part about this is that the set-top boxes draw a very small fraction of the power as the game consoles, which are power hungry beasts. I'm just spouting crap off randomly, as is my wont, but the Wii would have to be the lowest power consumer of the 3 major console systems. However the Wii would still be vastly more power hungry than a Roku, TiVo or Apple TV.
Okay, okay. I can't believe I'm doing this here on Slashdot (backing up my assertions with references) but here you go:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.htm [hardcoreware.net]
The Wii uses 1/10th the power of an XBox 360 or PS3. A quick search shows that a Roku uses around 5-6 watts when in use, which is half of the Wii's 11 watts.
So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.
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The xbox360 is essentially a computer. Even in a low power state computers scale, but don't scale to 1/10th of the power. If you have a computer with a high end video card you get the biggest powersavings not playing games. Typically 100watt vs 400watt. If you don't have a dramatically high end video card it'll be more like 250watt vs 100watt.
Add to that recent innovations and pushes for green technology have meant that energy efficient powersupplies are now 80% efficient at worst. Woot! 80%. But the Xbox36
Re:Power (Score:5, Informative)
So the moral of the story - using an XBox 360 or PS3 for streaming is very, very inefficient power-wise compared to dedicated set-top boxes or even the Wii.
Unfortunately, the Wii only does 480p. That's OK if you don't have much bandwidth and you're streaming Netflix, which is my situation, but it's a bit pathetic if you have a >40" 1080p TV and you're trying to stream something from your local server. What's worse, it doesn't actually have enough CPU to decode any high-res streams and scale them down, so you're pretty much limited to SDTV-resolution media. The 360 and PS3 are DLNA clients, so you can use them with PS3MediaServer on your PC to play anything that they can't handle themselves because they don't have a codec. Of course, that means you also have to have a computer capable of transcoding the media in realtime running at the same time, and ticking over nicely to boot. But it's the only solution that permits you to play essentially any file you might come across. The original Xbox with XBMC used to be that solution, but it can't handle 1080p media and it has only 1080i (or 720p, or lower-resolution) output.
The original Xbox was pretty good for its day, but it's pretty pathetic by modern standards. The Wii is what you'd really like to use, if only it had a touch more CPU and HD output. The next Nintendo system is supposed to cover those bases.
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I think the fact that almost nothing I watch on Netflix is even available in HD makes the Wii a fine choice. That, and I'm not about to pay any amount of money for a "gold" account to use my Xbox 360 for the same function. What a frickin rip-off! Not sure where Microsoft gets off thinking that's a good idea.
Anyway, 480p is DVD quality, and while it's not HD, I'm perfectly fine with it, even on my 60".
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For what they do, they're hard to beat at $50... or whatever they go for now.
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Meanwhile, any new TV has streaming built right in. We watch netflix on it very frequently.
So while consoles may undercut set-top boxes, TV's themselves undercut both, if streaming video is all you want.
My PS3 (Score:2)
I definitely use my PS3 to stream Netflix more than I play games on it. Although, that is only the case because I built my own gaming PC last year. If I didn't have my gaming PC I'd definitely be playing my PS3 a lot more.
Wii.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Huh, my TiVo HD XL (not the Premiere) does great playing Netflix, 720p/Dolby Digital and all. You can't do anything other than play what's in your queue (you can't add to your queue), but I never have buffering/crashing issues with it.
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Does the "back 10 seconds" work on your's, or does it have to stop and rebuffer? I can't remember if that was even supported by TiVo, it's been so long. On the Wii, you don't instantly go back, but you can select a key frame to go back to, then it rebuffers from there. The Roku has a "back 7 seconds" button, which works well, even going back multiple times.
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I upgraded for Netflix, OTA Digital subchannels which my cable provider does not have, and for when I get an HD TV.
If Netflix was the only reason I upgraded, then I would ha
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The Wii has a pretty good Netflix client/interface.
You mean HAD a pretty good Netflix client/interface.
A recent update to the Netflix client on the Wii turned it into a huge pile of slow, laggy, ugly crap.
Also, since the "upgrade", I often (maybe 20% of the time) can't get streams to start at all. Sigh.
Netflix is increasingly losing their way.
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The Wii has a pretty good Netflix client/interface.
Sadly, it was better before the latest update. Anyone tried going back to the old one? I downloaded some files for a channel that says Netflix V1, which I'm hoping is not the one that came on the disc.
what? (Score:4, Funny)
(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
What's so hard to imagine? Tons of people do it just fine.
Bogus Comparison: PC vs Console (Score:3)
(can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old, or more?)
What's so hard to imagine? Tons of people do it just fine.
Its also a bogus comparison. Consoles don't have a constant stream of upgraded CPU, RAM and video cards. In comparison the hardware specs of consoles are static. So a game written in year 1 of the console's life has the same hardware requirements as a game written in year 5 of the console's life. If that year 5 game has better visuals it is only because the programmers have greater experience and skills with respect to getting every bit of performance out of that 5 year old hardware. This is quite different
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I have a PC that I use daily with xp installed on '04. Works just fine.
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Not everybody runs out and buys a new PC every 2 years. Some of us like to get our money's worth. I'm amazed by how easily some people dismiss a 4 or 5 year old PC as a "dinosaur" when more often than not, PCs older than that work just fine, even for games.
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I haven't had a "wipe/reinstall" issue with my Windows PCs since probably '02 or '03...
That's not to say that I haven't done a full wipe/reinstall of my own volition in the intervening years...but it hasn't been due to a serious issue since soon after XP came out.
The whole "Windows is so broken you have to reinstall it every 3 months because ZOMG VIRUSSESSSS AND SPYYYYYYWARE" meme is getting retarded at this point. I use a ton of cracked and hacked shit on my Windows 7 system and I haven't had a problem ye
Fake antivirus posing as something else (Score:2)
I suspect it is mostly PEBKAC errors
Yeah, like downloading a "codec pack" to watch a video, elevating to install it, and finding the "codec pack" is really a fake antivirus. Or fake AVs that use a code execution vulnerability in Adobe Reader to pose as an update for Adobe Reader.
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Maybe so, but the meme is there because it's real. My wife got a virus from looking at facebook. She's very conservative and still got eaten by the fake A/V thing going around. Same happened to one of my employees the other day, and the only cure was a wipe/reload. It's rare for me to see a Windows computer last more than a year or so in "real use".
Oh, and playing cracked games doesn't count as "real use" in my book.
As CTO, I design our networks so that individual computers do not matter and all important d
Horribly inaccurate conclusion... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's the Wii that sees the most time as a streaming device, with Wii owners using their consoles to stream video a third of the time.
The fact that a Wii is used for streaming 33 *percent* of the time has nothing to do with the *amount* of time spent streaming. It's not only possible, but very likely that XBox and PS3 users spend a lot more total time using their consoles than Wii users.
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You know... (Score:2)
It's this kind of thinking that leads to divorce - and, no, I would never want to re-purpose my spouse as a "media streamer".
xbox 360 (Score:2)
Better quality from game consoles (Score:2)
I just recently started using my Xbox 360 for streaming Netflix, primarily because it supports 5.1 sound but also because of the better interface. My blu-ray player will do streaming also, but is rather more limited and only does stereo. The downside though is that Microsoft requires you to have an Xbox Live Gold account to do this, which is a whole other subscription on top of the Netflix subscription.
Yes, I can (Score:5, Insightful)
These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.
Diminishing returns in game development has reached the point where the jump to more powerful hardware, and therefore even higher-fidelity visuals, is just costing too much to justify the expense. That is the state of technology today. Some people don't like it because they want to forever relive the glory days of 90s MHz marketing and 3D card upgrades, but it's over, and thank goodness.
Re:Yes, I can (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, gaming is all old PCs are good for. The Apple II, TRS-80, Atari 800, all over 30 years old. I can't imagine doing productivity work on them but the games they play are as much fun today as they were 30 years ago.
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I can't imagine doing productivity work with less than 24 rows by 80 columns... but I remember getting a lot done with that. The games on my double-1680x1050 PC are much more awesome, though. And clearly WYSIWYG is a lot more rewarding.
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I can't imagine doing productivity work with less than 24 rows by 80 columns... but I remember getting a lot done with that.
Yeah, it's possible to do real work in 40 columns, but not unless you have to.
The games on my double-1680x1050 PC are much more awesome, though.
Games might inspire more awe in high definition, that's a fair point. But that's significantly different than "fun". The sense of awe only lasts an hour or so, and then you have to rely on gameplay.
And clearly WYSIWYG is a lot more rewarding.
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These days, I could. Because the 80s and 90s were something of a fluke in which hardware was progressing at a rapid rate, it coincided with the growth of the video game industry and attracted a lot of hardware geeks. But that era is gone, and hardware has stabilized to the point where new games are coming out targeting five year old hardware, and most people are okay with it. Skyrim runs on my first-generation Intel iMac from 2006.
For better or worse, there's a reason PC games have no issues on five year old hardware, and it's not because hardware has slowed down.
99% of PC games released now are ports from the consoles. Usually the only extras you get on PC are the trivially easy ones: support for higher resolutions, higher fps, and larger textures. If games didn't need to worry about running on ancient console hardware, they'd be able to look a lot more stunning on the PC.
There's also the problem of Windows' graphics stack introdu
PS3 has half that much VRAM (Score:2)
Skyrim requires a minimum of 512MB dedicated graphics memory
Then how does it run on a Sony machine with a GeForce 7800 and half that?
That's what my Xbox got used for... (Score:3)
Up until my TV died last christmas eve and I replaced it with a new one that had netflix built in. Although now the Xbox has Hulu plus as well. I did let my XBL subscription lapse last spring. With netflix built in, no longer needed it and wasn't playing many games. Now that it's winter I've gotten a new 1 year XBL subscription along with Battlefield 3.
My TV, internet, phone bundle is $150 a month and that includes all the premium channels, HDTV, DVR, etc. I thought about just getting cable internet and then Hulu plus and netflix and MLB.tv. But I got to adding it up and without the bundle the total would still be around $100 per month. And there would be a few shows I like and would miss or else have to order via iTMS or another source. And I'm not really interested in Bit Torrenting.
PS3? (Score:2)
My 4 year old has turned my PS3 into a Netflixstation 3. Though I'm just as guilty; it is just so damned convenient!
can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decad (Score:2)
can you imagine gaming on a PC that's half a decade old?
Yes I can, because I do. Plus, thus far, all major games have a minimum requirement of DirectX 9 which shipped in 2002.
Where do they get this data from? (Score:3, Funny)
Carrier IQ?
wii is an awesome netflix appliance (Score:5, Interesting)
Nintendo did it right in terms of how it handles its realtionship with netflix.
Microsoft insists you have gold membership before you can use netflix on the 360. This costs you an extra 10$/mo. Combined, if all you want is streaming, this costs you 18$/mo. This double dipping to use netflix prompted me to shell out the one time cost of a wii. It streams netflix 80% or more of the time I use it.
I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
I had none of those issues with the wii. Go to the wii market, pull the free app, sign up with netflix and register the device, and off you go. No 3rd parties to the transaction, no eulas and tos to agree to with nintendo to enable it, nada. The cover art is the wii netflix app is large enough to read from the couch easily, and it is quick and easy to search with the wiimote without entering the konomi code on the damn thing just to pick a letter.
The only drawback of the wii is that it is a low resolution device, and can't really push HD. If it did better than 480p at max it would be an ideal netflix appliance.
I don't know what the situation is on the ps3 with netflix, since last I heard psn was free, but with an abysmally one sided eula--
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I recently set up a sony blueray disc player for a friend of my sister's, which can stream netflix. In order to activate it, you have to agree to an eula from sony, register the device for streaming through sony, agree to a sony tos, *THEN* you can activate the device through netflix. Once you do, the netflix experience is lacklustre, having super teeny tiny cover art thumbnails, and a terrible search experience from the remote.
Anything from Sony is absolutely insane, go with an LG Bluray player, it works, it's easy to use, and it gets regular updates from LG. Hell, it even has an app store, the apps suck, but it has an app store.
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The only sony device I own (and use) is a second hand psp1001, (aka, psp fat), running cfw. I use it as a portable retro gaming platform.
The whole "itsy bitsy teeny tiny thumbnails" thing smacked of "you should use a bravia 70 inch 1080p with 3d for best viewing experience!" Type design decision for the native netflix client. No thank you sony. Your dream of owning my entire livingroom entertainment center is absurd and nightmarish to me. Go fuck yourselves, and your intrusive tos and eula as well.
I alread
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Anything from Sony is absolutely insane, go with an LG Bluray player, it works, it's easy to use, and it gets regular updates from LG. Hell, it even has an app store, the apps suck, but it has an app store.
I had an LG Blu-Ray player. After six months it stopped playing DVDs, I took it in for warranty repairs, it came back after a month and would play DVDs but no longer played Blu-Rays. I took it back for more warranty repairs and after eighteen months they said they couldn't fix it and couldn't get a replacement, so tough.
Meanwhile I've bought three Chinese Blu-Ray players from Wal-Mart for a total of roughly the same as I paid for the LG, and they all work fine and they're region-free. So no more LG products
Re:wii is an awesome netflix appliance (Score:4, Informative)
Re:wii is an awesome netflix appliance (Score:4, Informative)
Slightly modified: U U D D L R L R U U U U
Oh, and I'd say for now we use the Wii for Netflix and the homebrew WiiMC ( http://www.wiimc.org/ [wiimc.org] ) (for shoutcast 'radio', mostly) for about 80% of the Wii usage, and about 50% of total tv use. There is a 360 wrapped and under the tree, so those numbers will go down very soon.
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If those are running older firmware (if the drives are dead, then I presume you are not playing games, which forces you to use newer fw.) Then you can install HBC using banner bomb from the sdcard. No game disc required.
A little more tlc, and you can get usbloader set up, and still have a functional game system, despite the broken optical drive.
MediaTomb - Free UPnP MediaServer (Score:2)
http://mediatomb.cc/ [mediatomb.cc]
Works great with my PS3! Just make sure you hook up your console with an Ethernet cable - I got a lot of stuttering on fast-paced video over the wireless. I can play full 1080p MPEG4 video over 100 Mbps Ethernet.
HTPC: the new XBox (Score:4, Informative)
I use several XBoxes as streaming media consoles. They all have hard drive upgrades and softmods which means they can hold a lot more than the standard 8/10GB drives ever could - up to and including XBox game images, playlists, emulators, and they're all network mapped to each other and the 18TB media/file server.
So I could watch anything that's on the server or any console on any other console in the house, or kick up the game images and have a LANParty.
I dunno, they just seem to be built for it. It's certainly a lot less hassle than stumping up 15x the cost for systems that make 10x the noise, have 10x the power (and power requirement), take 100 times longer to boot... just plug it in and go.
The only downside to XBox is getting hold of controllers these days. New ones just plain ain't available and the secondhand market is dry at the best of times. On saying that the last controller I bought (blisterpacked XBox brand, standard size) came with a free console... Made me laugh when I got told that you could only get XBox controllers with a console kit (box, cables and controller)... and they were on special offer at £15!
New Life? (Score:2)
What is new about this?
I have done the same thing with my old modded Xbox years ago. Streaming video from a pc/NAS that is.
Had to stop when the poor box couldn't handle decoding the newer video files in real time any more, because they kept getting bigger. Well, I went from Xbox to Zbox.
I guess with the new ones you don't need to mod and install XBMC anymore? That means they always had this feature, so it's not new.
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I guess with the new ones you don't need to mod and install XBMC anymore?
With the new ones you can play the most popular media formats from a share, either a windows share or a DLNA share. But if you want to play something with a weird container or codec you'll need a PC (Windows, OSX, or Linux) running PS3MediaServer or similar, to transcode the file in realtime. As you might imagine it has to be fairly beefy, but nothing amazing by modern standards, if you want to do this with 1080p video.
This is... unexpected. (Score:2)
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Why? Video streaming usually isn't hi-def anyway. Netflix certainly isn't.
Exactly Why I Bought Mine At Walmart Black Friday (Score:3)
Yup (Score:2)
My PS3 is used for Netflix like 90% of the time, a DVD/Blu-Ray player 5% of the time, and NCAA Football 5% of the time.
Typo in headline: AGEING (Score:2)
Just thought I'd mention it. "Aging" is not a word in the English dictionary.
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AGING is just the American English form of AGEING -- both are acceptable.
Of course they use Wii... (Score:2)
ALL models have Wifi as well.
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Re:But the Wii doesn't even do HD! (Score:5, Insightful)
I stream with the Wii because I don't have an HDTV nor will we for the foreseeable future. I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the same boat as me who, with one kid and one on the way, one income and very little disposable cash, can't seem to justify a $500 TV purchase when we're using Netflix instead of cable to save money in the first place.
Re:But the Wii doesn't even do HD! (Score:4, Funny)
When Nintendo named the Wii back in 2005...I doubt they imagined that Streaming would become a popular use for the device.
None of us want to go around saying "I stream with my Wii"
We'd all sound like a bunch of 5 yr olds making obvious but inappropriate comments. :)
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Number of people in that situation probably isn't that high. People buy tons of crap they can't afford. I am just a cheapskate though. I could afford a lot more than that for a TV, but I am using an old 60" rear projector I got for free off of Craig's list. As long as it still works well, I see no need in replacing it.
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I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the same boat as me who, with one kid and one on the way, one income and very little disposable cash, can't seem to justify a $500 TV purchase
You're bang on - We have two kids (3.5 and 1.25 years old) and a flat-CRT trinitron. Works well and the kids don't know the difference. More important things to spend $X00. Besides, in this age of 'disposable consumerism' why throw the old TV away? I'll replace it when it doesn't work anymore. (And yes, most of my frie
Goodwill Store (Score:2)
no one even sells CRTs any more.
Pawn shops and charity shops do. There are still people who would buy a used CRT SDTV instead of a new HDTV, and not just people who play old NES games that need a CRT SDTV for the Zapper.
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I can get OTA with my little box and antenna just the same for a lot less. I don't need an HDTV to do that,
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Yes, there are many people just like OP. Many people even continue to use DVD on their HDTV, myself included. Roughly a third of the people I work with closely still use SDTV's and DVD's. One just bought his first HDTV about a month ago. Up until then he'd been watching Blurays on his 4x3 CRT.
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I don't think my network connexion would handle HD streaming very well; as it is, Netflix on my Wii has to drop the display quality down a noticeable amount and even then it sometimes has to stop to buffer.
HD would be nice, but it's not going to happen in the near future even if my hardware supported it.
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Netflix -rarely- does anything higher than 480p anyway.
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And they're streaming video with it 33% of the time? Hmmm.
It's a really really confusing statistic. If the average PS3/Xbox 360 owner played *games* for 6 hours a week and watched an hour of Netflix it would be "15%"
Compare that to a Wii owner who might play 40 minutes a week and play Netflix 20 minutes a week. Or maybe the average Wii owner plays 40 hours and also watches 20 hours of Netflix.
Without an absolute unit of measurement "%" means almost nothing. If I had a wii it would probably be used almost 100% for streaming.
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I finally got a new htpc setup last week...but for playing non HD content, it is almost the same as the original xbox.
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Argh! I should have read more closely!
I don't know if there's an equivalent of FFCoder for Linux, but off the top of my head I'd say Handbrake [handbrake.fr] will probably be of some use to you. Expression might work under Wine but in any case the scripting part, which you would definitely need (no batch processing without it), is in Powershell so you're SOL there I think.