Connect360

[thewrinklyninja]

I know I know, its a thread about Xbox 360 and Macs working together but hey, I want them to. Just been looking around on some 360 forums examining the ability to share media between the 360 and XP machines and discovered a lovely Mac app called Connect360 (http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/connect360) by Nullriver Software (http://www.nullriver.com/). This little beauty will share your itunes and iphoto library to your 360 for you to peruse at your own pleasure on your main screen. Apparently you can even listen to your itunes library while playing a game. So this makes me very happy. So far it doesn't do video apart from WMV. Lets hope they find a way round this so I can watch Heroes (http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/) on my big screen. I am gonna give this a try tonight on the free demo and will come back and give a report on how it went.

[Jim]

I've used Connect360 since it first came out, and totally love it.

As far as the video support, there is a little bit of hope; The Spring Dashboard updated, which is rumoured to launch the week of may 7th will have support for XVid.

[thewrinklyninja]

Well I gave Connect360 a quick run last night and gotta say, I like it. the demo only lets you use 100 songs and 100 photos as a limit but thats fine for testing purposes.

Installation

Install was simple, connect360 installs a prefpane and then you simply start the services and leave your mac on.

Music

I went to the other end of the house fired up the Xbox 360 and went to the media blade and selected "Music" and then computer as the storage device. It scanned the network and picked up the mac straight away and the next menu had my itunes library all laid out neat and tidy. What more could you ask for really.

Photo's

Photo's work the same. Select "Photo's" from the media blade and then navigate to your computer and your iphoto library is laid out before you.

Movies

connect360 requires you have flip4mac (http://www.flip4mac.com/) installed for WMV playback. I was unable to test movies as I do not have any in WMV format. I will try and get a small trailer in WMV format or transcode something in the next day or two and try it out. Connect360 works by indexing your movies directory, so in theory you should just dump all you WMV files in there and it will pick them up.

Conclusion

If you have a Xbox 360 and hanker to listen to your itunes library on it then connect360 is a great app. It does exactly what it's supposed to and in great mac fashion with no fussing or messing about. My only gripe is the video playback, which isn't connect360's fault but the Xbox 360's dashboard playback codec's. But if what people have been saying is correct and the spring dashboard update lets us play XVID (http://www.xvid.org/) videos, then connect360 would be one of my favourite media apps for a long time, and for a price of $20 it seems a bargain.

[Miles]

I saw this running at a friends house recently here in Bangkok. Pretty cool. I agree that once it is capable of running Xvid it will certainly be worth $20, but likely not before ;)

[Alex]

Well I gave Connect360 a quick run last night and gotta say, I like it. the demo only lets you use 100 songs and 100 photos as a limit but thats fine for testing purposes.

Installation

Install was simple, connect360 installs a prefpane and then you simply start the services and leave your mac on.

Music

I went to the other end of the house fired up the Xbox 360 and went to the media blade and selected "Music" and then computer as the storage device. It scanned the network and picked up the mac straight away and the next menu had my itunes library all laid out neat and tidy. What more could you ask for really.

Photo's

Photo's work the same. Select "Photo's" from the media blade and then navigate to your computer and your iphoto library is laid out before you.

Movies

connect360 requires you have flip4mac (http://www.flip4mac.com/) installed for WMV playback. I was unable to test movies as I do not have any in WMV format. I will try and get a small trailer in WMV format or transcode something in the next day or two and try it out. Connect360 works by indexing your movies directory, so in theory you should just dump all you WMV files in there and it will pick them up.

Conclusion

If you have a Xbox 360 and hanker to listen to your itunes library on it then connect360 is a great app. It does exactly what it's supposed to and in great mac fashion with no fussing or messing about. My only gripe is the video playback, which isn't connect360's fault but the Xbox 360's dashboard playback codec's. But if what people have been saying is correct and the spring dashboard update lets us play XVID (http://www.xvid.org/) videos, then connect360 would be one of my favourite media apps for a long time, and for a price of $20 it seems a bargain.

looks like a Macapper-worthy review :)

[thewrinklyninja]

Feel free to post this on MacApper if you like. Maybe you can pretty it up with some pics from their website. I am not usually good with putting pics in text

[Nick Cotton]

I'm really tempted to cave in and buy a 360. It's just I've always been a PlayStation guy, I don't think I can go without my Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy games.

Either way, I'll have to wait until they get significantly cheaper. That's probably not a bad thing though, I'll get to see which is better in the long run.

[thewrinklyninja]

I was a big PS2 fan, but I just could'nt justify the price of PS3 in any way. I actually bought a Wii first and have been playing that but Nintendo just seems to be letting us down on the online play front and third party games. I mean Super Mario Galaxy is being released nearly a year after the Wii?? come on. So I caved and got a 360, I got jealous looking at Gears of War and Elder Scrolls : Oblivion. I gotta say I like it quite a lot. Apart from when the disc loads up and it sounds like its about to take off and fly around the room.

[thewrinklyninja]

Also if you wait a while microsoft shoould be shifting to the new 65nm cores which should reduce overheating and fan noise, and if you have a TV with HDMI theres also the new "Elite" version. But I don't think they have the new cores.

[Nick Cotton]

Yeah you're right about the PS3 price, it costs AU$999, what a joke, and from what I've seen there aren't really any good games out for it, or none that I'm so eager to play that I must have it now.

[thewrinklyninja]

The only thing to tempt me back to Sony land is Final Fantasy XIII and more Gundam games.

[thewrinklyninja]

Woot!! new dashboard update supports H.264. Cue movie/anime/TV streaming goodness in brilliant quality. Connect360 has been updated to support H.264 and mpeg4 in mp4 and mov containers. Tried it last night works flawlessly from a thumbdrive but freezes while streaaming. Nullriver are aware of this, it has something to do with the way the 360 now caches the streaming video and are working on a fix.

Now I just have to convert all my anime from DIVX to H.264 (the upshot is, it takes up less HDD space) So I am using Visualhub for that job. Just load up the batch conversion and leave it humming all night.

This is a good thing for mac owners with a 360

[Jim]

Woot!! new dashboard update supports H.264. Cue movie/anime/TV streaming goodness in brilliant quality. Connect360 has been updated to support H.264 and mpeg4 in mp4 and mov containers. Tried it last night works flawlessly from a thumbdrive but freezes while streaaming. Nullriver are aware of this, it has something to do with the way the 360 now caches the streaming video and are working on a fix.

Now I just have to convert all my anime from DIVX to H.264 (the upshot is, it takes up less HDD space) So I am using Visualhub for that job. Just load up the batch conversion and leave it humming all night.

This is a good thing for mac owners with a 360
Version 3.1 was released today.

While I haven't tested out the newest version yet, the only listed change is "Major video streaming fixes and improvements", so perhaps this fixed the issue. :)

[thewrinklyninja]

Yep, got an email from Nullriver this morning about the update. Will install tonight and give it a shot and update this thread. Woohoo!

Thanks for the quick fix nullriver!

[B0rg]

Hmm the work on this app is really starting to persuade me to buy a 360 over a Wii. Any reports on the streaming fixes for Connect360? Any complaints to report?

[thewrinklyninja]

Well I get home at about 1800 GMT. Will install it and give it a try and report back

[Miles]

Sweet Ninja...I too am on the fence between a Wii and an Xbox 360.

[thewrinklyninja]

Well the update is installed and so far has worked flawlessly. To describe my setup I have the 360 hooked up to the wireless addon and stream to it on wifi. Just watched 3 episodes of Lost encoded on the MP4 standard setting on Visualhub (http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/) and they played perfectly. No hang ups or jitters or more importantly freezes!. Played ten minutes of a movie transcoded the same way and that also plays perfectly. Nullriver have outdone themselves with this update. If you have a mac and a 360 I think $20 is a damn good price to pay to be able to stream your non-drm videos, music and photos to it and view them all on your nice big telly.

Thumbs up! :thumbup:

If anyone needs me to try a specific format, ie mkv to mp4 or avi to mp4 just drop a comment and I'll give it a try

[B0rg]

Damn I am sold...Thanks a lot ninja!

I actually just was at a friends playing with his 360 and it seems a helluva lot more useful than a Wii. Now to find a reasonably priced xbox360 :tongue_smilie:

[Zeppo]

New poster here, arrived by searching for info/ discussions about Nullriver's Connect360.

One of the feature I really like about Connect360 is the ability to stream internet radio through my 360 via Connect360. It's easy. Just get the stream into your iTunes, and then drop that stream into a playlist. Once it's in a playlist, it shows up on the 360 music player's browser.

However, I have had inconsistent results. Some streams just don't want to work consistently, or even not at all. Some streams I was listening to the day before won't connect the next day. Very odd. Some streams (lucky for me, my personal favorite is one of these) seem to have no problems at all; others I can stream fine on the iTunes, but the 360 tries but can't seem to connect. And then, there are those like I mentioned that work one time, not the next.

Anyone have similar problems streaming internet audio (MP3) streams through the 360 via Connect360? Anyone have a clue as to why some streams work one time, not the next? Any simple fixes I am unaware of? Sometimes I'll make sure I can get the stream on iTunes once it doesn't connect in the 360, but even once I've got it working fine on the Mac, it still doesn't connect on the 360. Even if I Stop and the re-Start the Connect360 after ensuring I can get the stream to work in iTunes, they still don't work.

Any comments, witty observations, curious notions or even help would be appreciated! :) Thanks!

[Zordar]

Found this thread through a Google search, figured maybe someone here knows the answer.

I downloaded Connect360 3.1 and it's been working fine except for one oddity. I created a playlist in iTunes and dumped a couple files in it. My XBOX360 detected the MacBook Pro and listed the songs I put in the playlist. So I went back and changed the songs in the playlist, but my XBOX still only sees the original three songs (even though they are no longer in the playlist.) I e-mailed Nullriver, but they didn't know why it was happening.

Is this just a quirk with the trial version? I'm a bit nervous about buying an application that doesn't work.

-Z

[thewrinklyninja]

Found this thread through a Google search, figured maybe someone here knows the answer.

I downloaded Connect360 3.1 and it's been working fine except for one oddity. I created a playlist in iTunes and dumped a couple files in it. My XBOX360 detected the MacBook Pro and listed the songs I put in the playlist. So I went back and changed the songs in the playlist, but my XBOX still only sees the original three songs (even though they are no longer in the playlist.) I e-mailed Nullriver, but they didn't know why it was happening.

Is this just a quirk with the trial version? I'm a bit nervous about buying an application that doesn't work.

-Z

Hmm, not heard of that one. I'll give it a try when I get home tonight and see if I can replicate it and see whats going on