Turn your Xbox 360 into an iPod & iPlayer hub

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 12:45

The new year sales will be full of iPod docks, but if you've already got an Xbox 360 and speaker system, don't waste your money. The Xbox 360 download store has a free iPod app that lets you connect your player to the console via the USB sockets on the front of the console. Once plugged in, your albums, playlists and podcasts will be browsable from the Xbox's music player menu. Only DRM-protected AAC files from the iTunes store remain out of reach.

It isn't only songs stored on an iPod that can be played back - any MP3 or WMA music stored on an external USB hard disk or flash drive should be accessible. You can also access any music stored on a Windows Vista or XP Media Center PC through the Xbox 360's Media Center Extender facility, which also permits the playback of photos or video stored on the PC.

Using the Media Extender function and some hacking, you can play back shows downloaded on the BBC iPlayer on your Xbox console. Sadly, simply adding the iPlayer downloads folder to your "watched folders" in Media Center doesn't always work, thanks to DRM.

To work around the blue-screen error messages that appear, make sure you have Windows Media Player 11 downloaded on your PC, and check that it's set to share video with your Xbox 360 by clicking Library | Media Sharing. Then download the iPlayer programme on your PC. Once it's downloaded, play a show for a couple of seconds in the BBC iPlayer app on the PC to ensure the correct DRM licence is downloaded, then copy the file into another video folder and rename it.

The show should now play back on the Xbox 360, and you can use the Xbox's zoom video options (press X on the controller) to squeeze the 4:3 video into widescreen format.

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