Have Your Mac Stream Music and Photos to Your Xbox 360 with Connect360
By Alexander Grundner |
February 11th, 2006
Comments (2)
It looks like a software developer by the name of Nullriver has created a custom media server application for Mac OS X (10.3.9 or later) users that converts the Xbox 360 into Mac-friendly streaming digital media adapter. The application, which is called Connect360 (free trail available – $10 to own), ingeniously indexes all of your iTunes and iPhoto libraries then lets you access music by song, artist, genre, or playlist, and photos can be viewed by album or shown in a slideshow. Very nice. I wonder how they managed to mimic Windows Media Connect to get this to work?
Supported formats:
Audio: MP3/AAC/WAV/AIFF/Apple Lossless
Photo: JPEG/RAW/GIF/PNG/BMP/TIFF
Video: Not currently supported (Note: Windows XP can’t stream video either, only MCE can)
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Hi!
I reckon that like Windows Media Connect, this server program works as a UPnP MediaServer program but even Windows Media Connect can’t stream video to the XBox 360 because of some limitation on the part of the ‘360. Similarly you could use TwonkyVision MediaServer or other UPnP MediaServers to do the same job of providing music and photos to the XBox 360.
With regards,
Simon Mackay
Hi Simon,
We’ve actually discussed this topic before. Windows Media Connect (WMC) is capable of working with UPnP enabled devices, however, devices designed specifically to work with WMC (i.e. Xbox 360 & Windows Media Center Extenders) only work with WMC and not with a third party UPnP media server. Hence, the reason I asked.. How did they manage to mimic Windows Media Connect?
I guess I should contact the developer and see if he’ll give me a clue — there must be some type of SDK Mac developers now have access to. The cool thing is that if this really does work with the Xbox 360, then that means it wouldn’t be that hard to make it work with all WMC enabled media adapters (i.e. D-Link MediaLounge, etc.).
-Alexander