If you want to watch video on your Xbox 360, you can enable media sharing in Windows Media Player 11.

Your video must be using the WMV2 video codec and the WMA audio codec for this to work. If you have video in other formats, you have to use something like TVersity which converts movies on-the-fly. Personally, I find the performance to be too slow to make this viable.

The solution I use was suggested on another site, but I had a problem getting it to work. Here is how I got it working:

1. Download VLC player
2. Grab the Xbox 360 Conversion Batchfile and extract the batch file to a folder which you have media sharing enabled in.
3. Important: open the batch file in notepad and edit the part that says “F:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc” to point at the vlc executable. Note that the final ‘vlc’ refers to the executable itself so you will need to change the initial ‘F:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\’ part to the folder your installation was stored in.

Then, to convert a file, just drag any movie file onto the batch file and it will start converting it straight-away! If you get an exception, it is because you did not edit the batch file to point at the video land executable correctly. This is a really stupid bug in windows!

I created the theme for this site by following a tutorial at www.cypherhackz.net. Before I started to build the site up into this style, I took a zip of the theme which I’ll offer up here for people to use to save time making their own.

I have incorporated a set of CSS style rules at the top of the page to help the style sheet remain consistent across browsers. Many thanks to Eric at meyerweb.com for working them all out!

I must admit when I first learnt of this problem, I had a really hard time accepting that the solution was correct.

While I am not of the opinion that computer programs should be used (or even can be used) to solve mathematical problems, the exercise of writing this program provided a real penny drop moment that finally allowed me to ignore my instincts and trust the true solution.

I’ve posted up a c# solution if anyone is interested. If you don’t have the compiler installed, just open up the zip, navigate down to the MontyHallTest\bin\Release folder within it and run the MontyHallTest.exe program.

A “make your own mind up” review of Crackdown for the 360.

The game

Crackdown doesn’t fit into a particular genre very easily but combines the free-roaming world of grand theft auto, elements from most 3rd-person shooters and some free-running/urban-running thrown in.

It is set in the future but only just. The buildings and technology are pretty much contemporary and the only hint that it is in the future is that your character is a clone and graphically it has the look of a graphical novel.

Read more…

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These are my thoughts after playing a demo of DiRT via xbox live.

Firstly, those who are familiar with the series will note a slight deviation in the game title. It’s not Colin McRae’s Rally or Colin McRae 2007 - the DiRT name is a bit of a hint. Read more…

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