I recently read an article from TUAW discussing Mac users and Xbox 360. Being that I am in this category I was very intrigued. By default Xbox 360 does not directly support Mac OSX. It does however interface very nicely with Microsoft’s own Media Center (imagine that) and adds great media center abilities to the already awesome 360. Unfortunately Mac users are left out in the cold, that is until Connect 360 came out. Connect 360 is the bridge between the Xbox 360 and your Mac, by adding streaming abilities for your music, photos, and videos.

I have a little review of the three products I needed to make streaming utopia happen on your Xbox 360. The main ingredient I have already mentioned, Connect 360. Connect 360 costs $20 to purchase, however you can try out their demo for free. The demo does not expire, but does limit the amount of music, photos, and video you can stream. There is not much to explain about Connect 360. It was very easy to set up, and has worked flawlessly for me. With Connect 360 you can easily listen to all of your iTunes songs (DRM free) and playlists. The iPhoto streaming feature is also great for displaying your photos to family and friends. I found that is really works great for parties. For this I turn my music and photo slideshow on random. It really makes a great conversation piece when a great random photo appears.

The tricky part of the whole equation is video streaming. Unfortunately the Xbox 360 only supports WMV formated videos only. I don’t know many Mac users that have WMV files on their computer as Microsoft stopped making WMV player for the Mac years ago. First you need to be able to play WMV format videos on your Mac. Download Flip4Mac Components for Quicktime. This little app is required to play WMV files on your Mac. Also Connect 360 will not work correctly with out it installed. Now the last problem, how do I get my video converted to WMV format. Well you could download Flip4Mac Studio Pro but that will run you around $100. I prefer VisualHub at around $24. Visual Hub will convert your video files to WMV, as well as iPod, PSP, DV, DVD, Tivo, AVI, MP4, MPEG and Flash. It is the Swiss army knife of video encoding. VH has a simple drag and drop interface that makes it truly easy to convert your video without knowing anything about converting video. Now let me speak to the overall quality of the video being streamed. While I stated the conversion was easy to convert, it will take a fine art to master the quality of the video you are converting. VisualHub has a setting called "Go Nuts" which by default is their highest pre-configured preset. While the video quality looks great you may run into lag problems while streaming as the overall sizes produced are much larger. I found the best results while encoding on the "high" setting and by changing the qmin to 5. However results may vary for you.

Next the experience with on the Xbox 360 is not all roses. Rewinding and fast-forwarding does not work correctly. If you FF the video will likely freeze or boot you back to the Xbox 360 dashboard. Again results may vary. Overall I found that streaming to the Xbox 360 is very great experience. If you compare this solution to the newly released Apple TV the results sound even more compelling. I think it is a great reason for those with home theaters to reconsider purchasing the Xbox 360 for a media extender. It is a wonderful gaming platform, has HD and surround sound built in, can download HD content directly to the box, and it can play HD-DVD’s. Also Microsoft plans to unleash more functionality in their upcoming spring update.

• Support for streaming WM-DRM protected content from a PC

• H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.

• Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.