Should I Upgrade to Windows Media Center?
XP Media Center is a “superset” of Windows XP Professional; everything in Pro is in Media Center. You’ll get real value from it by installing a TV tuner. If you’re hoping to stream videos to your 360, those videos need to be in a supported format (i.e. WMV or MPG, generally). You can’t stream Divx/Xvid to the 360 Extender without running some (IMHO) hokey software. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve got a Media Center PC with two TV tuners (pulling in basic cable) and one ASTC tuner (to pull down hi-def broadcasts over-the-air from Chicago). It streams those recordings to two 360s in the house, and the wife LOVES it (and, hey, I get to play Fight Night every now and than).
XP Media Center is a “superset” of Windows XP Professional; everything in Pro is in Media Center. Might seem pedantic, but: While you can access network resources on a work network or a domain, you cannot join a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PC to the domain. PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 are designed specifically for home use. Windows XP Professional features, specifically Domain Join and Cached Credentials (Credentials Manager for logons) are not included. As a result, you will be prompted for your logon user name and password to access network resources after you reboot or log back on to the PC. In addition, file shares or network resources that are set to require a domain-joined PC for access will not be available. Remote Desktop and Encrypting File System support are still included. From here. But I doubt you really need to do that.
It’s not possible to upgrade to Windows Media Center except by buying a new machine. You can buy the Media Center software from Ebuyer.
I upgraded my PC to MCE to stream video to my Xbox 360. As has been mentioned, you can buy an OEM version through any number of online retailers (Google “Windows Media Center Edition OEM”) although technically you’re not supposed to. I say bollocks to that, I see no reason why MCE isn’t off-the-shelf software, except to prevent a ton of tech support calls from people who install it on systems that don’t meet the minimum requirements or wonder why they “can’t watch TV” on a system with no tuner card, etc. It’ll cost you about $100 to buy. But, as also has been mentioned, unless you’re encoding your own videos, the majority of internet-based videos that you’re likely to download via torrents or whatnot are going to be Divx or Xvid encoded and won’t stream to the 360, which makes it a hobbled solution at best. Aside from video streaming, it IS kind of a kick to be able to log on to MCE’s “Online Spotlight” feature on the 360 that contains a lot of specially-formatted websites from the lik
