Forum up!

I’ve installed some forums to facilitate feedback for the BlenderXNA project.

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Converting video for playback on an Xbox 360

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!

The Monty Hall Problem

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.