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Transcode 360

Transcode 360 enables the playback of unsupported video over Xbox 360 and Media Center Extender devices. This software is designed to run on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

Transcode 360 is completely free for non-commercial use, donations are always appreciated. If you like Transcode 360 and find it useful please make a small donation to sponsor further development of this project.

You can make a donation simply by clicking the link here.

Features

Transcode 360 is fully featured, providing a clear and efficient interface, tightly integrated with your Media Center PC to enable a much more seamless experience than other 3rd party solutions.

On your media extender, highlight the video you wish to watch and press the Info button on your remote to start enjoying video played back to you via Transcode 360.

Advanced users can configure Transcode 360 to run in distributed mode, delegating the CPU intensive task of transcoding movies to more powerful computers in their home network.

Background

It would have been great if Microsoft had designed Media Center Extenders including the Xbox 360 with the ability to play back a wide range of video but they don’t.

Instead support is limited to DLNA compliant formats such as MPEG2 and WMV9 (optional) with the notable exception of MPEG4.

This is were Transcode 360 comes in.

What is transcoding?

A transcoder is a process that converts media from one format to another, in this case to high-quality MPEG2 for streaming to a Media Center Extender device such as the Xbox 360.

As of Beta 2, Transcode 360 can transcode faster than real-time, this is an advantage not afforded by other products which are for the most part, either real-time or batch solutions.

One obvious benefit of faster than real-time transcoding is that it is now possible to skip over advertisments in recorded TV footage using Transcode 360.

Why?

A large number of people have an investment in digital video content that is encoded using MPEG4 based compression; some of it legitimate, some of it illegitimate.

Transcode 360 will operate transparently and without prejudice, transcoding and streaming your video files back to your Xbox 360 or Media Center Extender for playback in real-time.