Archive for the ‘Xbox 360’ Category

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Trouble downloading the new Halo 2 maps from an Xbox 360

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

The new Blastacular map pack for Halo 2 launched today, and being a huge Halo fan I raced to pick them up. I’m happy to see new content coming out for a game that’s over two years old, and Hang ‘em High (remade as Tombstone) was easily my favorite Halo: CE map. I’m also really glad that Bungie decided not to make the maps Xbox 360 exclusive, a move that would have greatly simplified purchasing and downloading the maps at the expense of fragmenting the player base between Xbox 360 players and original Xbox players.

Blastacular Map Pack - Tombstone

I chose to download the maps to my Xbox 360 (I love the 720p upsampling), but the purchase process was not particularly smooth. When I tried to buy the maps, I got this message: “Premium purchases are not enabled for this Xbox Live account”. This was a confusing error since I’ve bought plenty of things through Xbox Live Marketplace before without any problem, and I knew I had no parental restrictions in place. My friend Mark figured it out though, and clued me in. Like many Xbox 360 users, we’d created Xbox Live Silver accounts in non-US regions to get access to foreign game demos. This came in really handy back when the Chromehounds demo came out everywhere but in the US. However, for some reason it messed with the backwards-compatibility-mode Xbox downloader. I’m not sure if it’s because the accounts were from a different region, or because they were Silver accounts and the original Xbox has no concept of Silver accounts. Anyway, the solution was to sign in with the Silver account and attempt to purchase the maps. This will fail, but then you can sign in with your regular Gold account and download the maps. Hopefully this fix will let more people enjoy these great maps.

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Posted in Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 8 Comments »

Getting Windows Media Center to stream DivX/XviD to an Xbox 360 from Vista x64

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

I’ve been spending the past couple weeks playing with a brand new machine I made for Windows Vista, and it’s been great. One of the things I’ve been looking forward to the most is Windows Media Center. Aside from the fun I can have developing WMC addons, I’ve been meaning to try out the Windows Media Extender functionality of my Xbox 360. Hooking up my laptop to my TV every time I want to watch things just doesn’t cut it. Unfortunately, I have one problem – most of what I watch is already encoded in XviD format, which the Xbox 360 lacks a codec for.

But that’s not my only roadblock. Being a sucker for the bleeding edge, I decided that my shiny new Core 2 Duo, being a 64-bit processor, should run Windows Vista Ultimate x64. Right off the bat this presented a problem – after installing DivX and XviD, Windows Media Center would complain that any file I threw at it was unreadable. This didn’t make any sense, since those same videos played just fine in Windows Media Player. Perplexed, I happened upon Task Manager, where I noted that Windows Media Center was running in native (64-bit) mode, while Windows Media Player was running in 32-bit mode. The problem was that I only had 32-bit video codecs, and Windows Media Center couldn’t use them from its 64-bit ivory tower.

However, no problem is a problem for very long. Both of my issues can be resolved with freely available software, and here’s how it works. First, you need to install the ffdshow Vista Codec Package. This will put video codecs for just about every known video format onto your machine. No worrying about downloading this codec and that codec – they’re all here. Next, install the ffdshow x64 components. This makes all those codecs usable from 64-bit programs, as well as giving you a handy shortcut that will set Windows Media Player to always run as 64-bit, too!

Now all your videos work in Media Center. To close the gap with the Xbox, you need Transcode360. This app will transcode your videos, on the fly, into a format the Xbox 360 can understand. It takes a hefty machine, but you’ve got a 64-bit processor anyway, right? Once this is installed, just fire up Media Center from your Xbox, navigate to a movie, hit “Info” on your remote, select “More…”, and select “Transcode 360″. It’ll pause for a while as it crunches through the first few minutes of your video, then it’ll start. Voila!

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Posted in Windows, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 14 Comments »

No Xbox Live Arcade Demos – Greasemonkey Script

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Last night I hammered out a quick Greasemonkey script (poetically called “No Xbox Live Arcade Demos”) to solve one of my pet peeves in the otherwise awesome Xbox.com website. The problem is that while you can check out the list of games you’ve played, and all your achievements in them, it will also include Xbox Live Arcade demos that you’ve played but not purchased. Since you haven’t purchased them, you can’t earn achievements or gamerscore, so it’s kind of useless to have them in the list. All my script does is go and look for games with “0 of 200″ points – indicating an Arcade game you haven’t played (or a new one, which is a problem but unfortunately that seems to be the best way to find them). As a bonus, the script also removes these games from your “total games” count, and removes their score from your total possible gamerscore. The total gamerscore thing in particular annoyed me, since you’d have to buy every demo to realize that “potential”. The script also works on the “Compare Achievements” page, removing any Arcade games that neither you nor your friend have played from the list. I hope everybody enjoys this!

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Posted in Greasemonkey, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »
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