Add an Xbox 360 to Your Existing Home Network and Share Digital Media– Part I of V

Windows Media Center is a full-service media application included with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. If you have one of these Vista editions and a TV tuner, you can watch live TV, record it, and even pause (and then fast-forward) though television programs. If you have a DVD player and burner, and you can watch and burn DVDs. With the right speakers you can manage and listen to music too, and with a big enough monitor, share a slide show of your favorite pictures with friends. Of course, you can also watch and manage home video. You can even get media online, right from the Media Center interface! No more trips to Blockbuster or waiting for your Netflix movie to arrive in the mail.

Employing this technology using a Vista PC (and Media Center) to manage all of your digital media may also mean you’ll have to gather the family around a single PC to view the media you’ve saved and want to watch. That’s no good. However, by installing a media extender like an Xbox 360, you can access all your media from any other room in your home, or even show a movie in a home theater. With an Xbox 360, you can connect to your Windows Vista PC from anywhere in your home through a wired or wireless network connection, and use the Xbox to “extend” it.

In case you’re not sure what an Xbox 360 is: An Xbox 360 is capable of displaying (referred to as “extending”) Media Center from a Windows Vista PC, over a network, and to your home theater display, living room, or any display that you can connect an Xbox 360 to. You can even directly access your Windows Media Player library without having to open Media Center on the Xbox 360, and even play entire albums directly in certain video game titles, replacing the included game soundtrack with your own.

In the next four articles, you’ll learn about how to connect an Xbox 360 to your Windows Vista PC and your existing network so that you can access Media Center and your Windows Media Player library.

Note: Although accessing Media Center from an Xbox 360 requires a high-performance network, accessing your media in Windows Media Player 11 (through Media Sharing) from an Xbox 360 does not. An Xbox 360 can also access Zune media on your computer, though we will not discuss how to use an Xbox 360 with Zune software in these articles.

There are four steps to installing, configuring, and accessing shared media on a home network using Windows Vista’s Media Center:

1. Select the appropriate type of home network.
2. Connect an Xbox 360 to your home network.
3. Add an Xbox 360 Extender to Media Center.
4. Access your Windows Media Player library from an Xbox 360 or another Windows Vista PC.

This article was excerpted from How To Do Everything with Windows Media Center, written by Joli Ballew and Justin Harrison for McGraw-Hill Companies and a copyright exists at McGraw-Hill. Permission must be granted by McGraw Hill to reuse or republish this material.

Add an Xbox 360 to your existing home network and share digital media– Part I of V

Add an Xbox 360 to your existing home network and share digital media– Part II of V

Add an Xbox 360 to your existing home network and share digital media– Part III of V

Add an Xbox 360 to your existing home network and share digital media– Part IV of V

Add an Xbox 360 to your existing home network and share digital media– Part V of V