I am trying to play various formats on my 42" plasma via my Xbox 360

[Doug_xx2]

Hi there

I just know someone here will be able to help me out. I have a number of 1080p hd quality videos um er hum downloaded in various formats that I am trying to play on my 42" Panasonic plasma via my Xbox 360. my Xbox is on a wired connection via my ea6500 ac 1750 DLNA certified router to my PC. my PC is home built with a 2 Tb hard-drive, ASUS p8h67-m Motherboard, 8 GB ram, I5 2320 processor, windows 8, windows media player 11 (used to share my videos with my Xbox), and a Sparkle nVidia geForce GTX 560 2 GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16, Factory Overclocked w/ SLI Support, Dual DVI and mini HDMI ports. Now I know I could take the time to re-encode these video files to a friendlier format (but I don't wanna) or I could use a long HDMI cable to connect my PC directly to my TV (but I don't wanna). I am trying to get it to stream via my 1 gigabit network card through my router into my Xbox and then use my Xbox to pipe sound to my home theater system via optical cable and video to my TV via component cable... This seems to be working great for the most part. the picture is awesome the sound is awesome and I am able to play all of my files to my TV and PC with no problem..... except...... (you knew it was coming didn't you). when I play very high bit-rate videos with full surround sound in 1080p etc etc and it gets to scenes where there is a LOT of video processing stuff like a million birds swarming around in the sky or an animal splashing around in the water in a closeup with thousands of droplets of water spewing everywhere or a scene of a forest sliding by from a helicopter flying over it quickly I get little black holes streaks rainbow colors etc. (this is not the video (I think) it plays fine on my PC) I have also noticed it only seems to be mkv format files (which most of my collection is in) I also notice that for every other video format I have tried my PC seems to be porting it through my GPU and there is almost no CPU load caused by it but with the mkv files it goes directly to the system and my little I5 CPU load goes to nearly 100 percent. It is probably also important to note that when I watch these files on my PC it is being ported through my GPU and there is almost no CPU load. why in the name of all that is unholy won't that sack a frassin rasa frass of a windows media player 11 utilize my GPU when streaming to my Xbox (it does when it is playing it to my monitor)? The same scenes don't do this when played to my monitor (I assume this is because when it is playing to my monitor it is using my GPU but when streaming to the Xbox it is using my cpu). what can I do to fix this problem I am stumped. any thoughts would be appreciated.

If you need any other info feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance,
Doug_xx2

[Baldrick]

I changed your thread title.

What is your exact question? Too much text. .

[jman98]

The truth is that the Xbox has been obsolete as a file playing machine for over FIVE years now. Given it's limitations, using it is basically painting yourself willingly into a corner. Your life would be about a million times simpler if you just bought a Western Digital streaming media player of some type and used that instead. If you're determined to do this, others can help you, but be warned that you're likely going to have to spend a lot of constant time re-encoding everything to get the stupid Xbox to play it whereas almost everything you get the WD devices will handle as is.

[Doug_xx2]

Baldrick: why in the name of all that is unholy won't that sack a frassin rasa frass of a windows media player 11 utilize my GPU when streaming to my Xbox (it does when it is playing it to my monitor)? The same scenes don't do this when played to my monitor (I assume this is because when it is playing to my monitor it is using my GPU but when streaming to the Xbox it is using my cpu). what can I do to fix this problem I am stumped.

jman98: I seem to have it working and playing everything I have anyway the problem was described in the looooong post and the question is

why in the name of all that is unholy won't that sack a frassin rasa frass of a windows media player 11 utilize my GPU when streaming to my Xbox (it does when it is playing it to my monitor)? The same scenes don't do this when played to my monitor (I assume this is because when it is playing to my monitor it is using my GPU but when streaming to the Xbox it is using my cpu). what can I do to fix this problem I am stumped.

[Baldrick]

You can't use the gpu for streaming.

But you can try another (better) streamer like the ps3 media server. Yes, it should work to a xbox360 also.

[aedipuss]

the gpu can only be used to play a video, not send a file to a media player.

[Doug_xx2]

I know that the gpu encodes or re encodes the video and a portion of windows media player transcodes the files (encodes them to a playable format and then transmits or streams them) across the network. if they have encoding programs that utilize the gpu to re-encode video then it stands to reason that a transcoding program can also utilize the gpu to do the encoding and decoding portion of the transcoding process. in fact I have heard rumored that there are media server programs that use cuda to do just that. I am looking for a way to make windows media player use it in its transcoding process as it is doing so for all other formats except the mkv files as mentioned in my original post.

[aedipuss]

wrong. all that's sent to the xbox is the original file.

[Doug_xx2]

no... it's not

the Xbox is not reading the original file it is reading the trans-coded stream or the decoded video stream sent to it from the windows media player 11 media server. I am not plugging it into the Xbox on a disk or USB drive. I am playing it from the media server embedded into windows media player 11 using the Xbox 360's video player. now I am not familiar with whether or not my Xbox is receiving raw video and audio information from the server or a re-encoded version of that raw video and audio stream but it is most definitely not receiving the original file as it would not be capable of decoding the mkv container. the reason I am not sure is that either way it could be causing the CPU usage when playing them and I have not found documentation yet to explain it to me. now there are formats that it can handle and I can only hope that the media player server is smart enough to figure that out and not re-encode it anyway but it does not have processor usage while serving some files that the Xbox should not be able to read which I attribute to the fact that the software has gotten it right with those and is porting that video through the GPU (at least for the decoding sequence and possibly re-encoding to) but I am trying to figure out how to make that happen with the mkv container as well. I'm sorry I was not aware that everyone would be so danged set in their hatred for Microsoft that they wouldn't even take the time to review my material and try to give me an educated answer. I knew it said for newbies here and I thought someone with advanced knowledge would want to help me and do more than spat disparagements and corrections to my "wrong" information but that they would instead answer my question in a way that was informative and easy to understand. if this is all I am going to get never mind. sorry I insulted all of you with a question.

[aedipuss]

bye