The Department of Ancient Tech needs your help

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
03/04/2019 at 22:25 • Filed to: None

Has anyone here set up an Xbox 360 as an extender for Windows Media Center on Windows 7? The devices sorta communicate but never seem to make a proper c onnection. Is it the anti-virus software, the firewall, my network or something I’m not aware of? You’d think it would be fairly easy, but this is Windows after all . The Xbox is connected to a wifi extender in lieu of its own wifi adapter and it does see t he internet, so I doubt that this is the problem - maybe...

DISCUSSION (18)

MM54 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 22:40

I remember trying to do this when it was new and never getting it to work. Good luck!

arl > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 22:50

You just summed up my career in IT, especially when dealing with MicroSoft products

“You’d think it would be easy, but....”

Good luck sir.

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 22:56

I think I did this ages ago, but didn’t really have much use for it as my HTPC was connected to my TV.

WMC is pretty dead anyway, a long line of Microsoft products with promise bu insufficient follow through.

What are you actually trying to do?

Longtime Lurker > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 22:58

Ha I could never get this feature to work properly! Good luck.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > facw
03/04/2019 at 23:35

I actually use WMC on a daily basis and it does what I need it to do . I have a four-tuner card that records a number of OTA programs for me. The computer is located in my home office, but I’d like to watch the programs on the big TV in the living room without having to relocate the computer as I use it for other functions . It seems like the 360 would make a great extender for WMC if I can get the two to talk.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > arl
03/04/2019 at 23:37

Speaking a s a network engineer I know exactly what you mean. When I first started, back in 1996, I was the only one that knew how to troubleshoot and repair Windows for Workgroups, so of course I got to work all of the ancient, troubled systems. It’s a miracle I didn’t quit right then and there...

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 23:39

Hmm, it should work for that (though it hurts to run something as power hungry and loud as a 360 to essentially be a dumb terminal). Don’t have any great advice for you though.

Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 23:46

That’s because back then, we knew damn well better than to jump on whatever the fuck the flavor of the month snake-oil was.

“My Docker has become self-aware and committed suicide. How do I fix it?”
“Nobody runs Docker, use K8!” “NO USE KUBE!” “NO USE NODE.JS!”
“My K8 has literally set my data center on fire. We recovered from backups, now nothing works, how do I fix this?”
“Nobody runs K8 any more, we’re all using microservices!” “Yeah, only a stuck in the past loser uses K8!”

Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 23:48

This sounds like a job for me.
By which I mean: yes money is involved. I said job.

No, seriously.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > facw
03/04/2019 at 23:52

I was just thinking about the noise when I fired up the 360 for the first time in years last night. Perhaps I’ll look at what other devices I have that might do the job (Apple TV, Roku, Samsung and Sony BD players, WDTV Live, etc.). I thought this would be easy, but as is normal with Microsloth, that’s turning out not to be the case. Share the volume with the recorded programs? Perhaps I’ll try that, but as usual, MS does not make even that basic task a simple process. It’s my own network, in my own home - why do I need corporate levels of security? It’s either a challenge or dumbed down to the point of being useless.

jminer > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/04/2019 at 23:53

I did this for several years, but with a windows home server. The trick to making it work was a combo of windows 7 homegroups, sharing settings and an already setup and functional windows media center.

A much better way though it the Plex app. Still works with a Windows 7 machine and an XBOX 360 very well. Setup a plex server on your workstation (free) and install the plex app on your XBOX (also free). You do need a live account logged in on the XBOX (it can be a non-subscription account).

Plex actually works better as it will run on most of your devies (phones, tablets, roku and so on).

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks
03/04/2019 at 23:58

How much will you pay me?

Oh, right.

20+ y ears ago, b ack when I did some consulting work on the side, I raised my rates to $75/hr, 4 hours minimum. I was trying to scare away some of my regulars, but they kept calling me back. Thankfully I got my biggest customer to agree to migrate to an Internet-based solution, and after that didn’t need to deal with their dedicated line and software in Italian (the parent company was based in Italy. I didn’t speak or read Italian, but managed to translate enough of it to figure out the program.)

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > jminer
03/05/2019 at 00:03

Instead of using the Xbox, perhaps I can run Plex on a little Asus Eee PC thingy I have laying around here somewhere. I picked it up off of CL years ago for $20 but haven’t actually put it to use anywhere. I assume it would be quieter than the Xbox, and probably consume less power as well.

Kinja'd!!!

Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/05/2019 at 00:15

For work that will include device driver creation and development, and also porting significant software, owned by a company that hates anything open source (PLEX,) yeaaaaaaaaah it gets expensive. The beauty is, once delivered, that’s it. It. Just. Works. It just keeps working. The box rebuilds packages itself, applies security updates, applies software updates, you just watch your shit.

Mind, I still haven’t had time to figure out multi-user. But, baby steps.

jminer > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/05/2019 at 00:17

For SD video maybe , not sure it’ll have the oomph to decode HD video. Those first gen Atom chips were extremely underpowered 10 years ago for all but the most basic workloads. The most I could ever make one of those atom machines do was either display a web page (as a dashboard) or run some light linux based workflows.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > jminer
03/05/2019 at 00:34

Hmm, you may have a point there. Perhaps I can scrounge up enough parts to put together an i5 system that would do a better job. I’ve got a system I was building out of spare parts that would probably do a better job (i5 2500K, 16GB DDR3, 240GB SSD) that I could probably dedicate to this job. With a decent video card (I think I have an R9 laying around somewhere), I wonder if it might even be able to use this to drive the 4K TV I just bought. I’m not really interested in recording or transcoding at that resolution, just using it for playback of existing media, no more than 1080p, and a bit of web surfing from the couch.

NojustNo > jminer
03/05/2019 at 12:40

Thats not a first gen chip if it's what's pictured

jminer > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/05/2019 at 18:02

That would probably do, I’m still running my pl ex server on a FX-8350(8 cores!) but it’s a good deal faster than that 2nd gen i5.

Not sure what the spec is for video output on an R9 , the higher specs one's could probably handle 4k video playing but not for certain on that one.