Big Bowl O' Awesome

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that fellow blogger Evanesce pointed out to me that just because I own a wireless router doesn’t mean I have to spend a hundred bucks on a wireless adapter for the 360 when a ten dollar Ethernet cable will do.

Well, today we were Christmas shopping in Wally-world and I found and bought me an Ethernet cable.

I bought the thing for two main reasons:

1) It’s a huge pain in the ass having to rewire my living room every time I want to take the 360 online.

2) Not only did playing the 360 online tie up the TV, it also tied up the internet connection, meaning that if I wanted to play online Sunny couldn’t even use the internet while I was playing.

Basically, it was a pure convenience/utility purchase.

However, there was a third reason I didn’t really think about…and that reason is absolutely awesome.

Two words: Media Extender.

What does that mean? In a nutshell it means I can play all the videos and music I have on my PC through the TV.

This is a big deal for me, because the internet is how I keep up with all the British TV shows that I can’t get over here.

Now, before networking the PC and the 360 if I wanted to watch the show on our TV from the couch, I had to download the show, convert the show to DVD format, burn the show to a DVD then slap the DVD in the DVD player. Bear in mind that it could easily take over an hour to convert the file, and it also meant using up a DVDr which was a gigantic pain in the ass.

Now? I download the show, turn on the 360 and pick it from a list. Two seconds later it starts playing on my TV.

The other thing that’s really cool is because the 360 looks in your “My Videos”, “My Pictures” and “My Music’ folders…just by enabling media sharing on my PC, my 360 found my entire iTunes music library…and it’s pre-organised and I can create playlists right on the 360.

Given that the 360’s connected to our surround sound system, that’s going to be just awesome for parties, etc.

The best bit was that it was honestly scary easy to set up. I just rebooted my PC, started up Media Player 11, clicked on ‘library’ and clicked ‘enable media sharing’.

Then, it just took a minute or so for the 360 and PC to find each other, I clicked ‘allow’ when my firewall flagged the connection and I was away.

It’s crazy awesome. If you have a PC and a 360 on the same network and haven’t set up media sharing, you really are missing a trick.

Try it. It’s awesome.