Nullriver has a program called Connect360, think you all know it. I tried it last night. I had ripped two movies (that I own, thank you, for backup purposes) with HandBrake to the ATV format and put them on my file server. I added them to iTunes and started 360. It runs as a daemon and is controlled through system preferences. Went to the Xbox , selected media, video, source and the Mac showed up. Chose it and it presented both movies. Both worked fine and the resolution was just a little bit less than the DVD, noticed some color artifacts and pixilation. May need to step up the bit rate from 2500 to around 3000 I guess. But it worked flawlessly.
So my new direction (for this week) is to try this approach since the app is only $20 and ATV is ~$300. That and with the news that Xbox will have streaming from Netflix this fall and will someday stream in HD. The main thing preventing me from going with ATV is that Apple doesn’t have a subscription service for movies. After having Netflix, who would go to a la cart? Maybe Apple should do a deal with Netflix, now that would ROCK !!!!
The Netflix catalog, available through the iTunes store as a subscription, in HD, controlled directly from ATV using the iPhone remote….
L u k e n . o r g 