WMC7 and XBox 360???

[ChrisBurton]

Hi All,

I am hoping someone can help me with these issues I’m facing. I managed to sell the idea of a media centre network to the missus and now my face has turned a nice shade of red!

Background: I have a Media Centre PC in the front room (AMD Dual Core Machine / 2Gb RAM / 64bit running Windows 7 Pro 64). The machine was formatted recently and only has Windows 7 Pro 64bit OS installed (so no crap running in the background slowing things down!). It is connected to the internet (Virgin 10Mb) via LAN using a D-Link Wireless ‘N’ router.I can very happy run WMC7 and have access to all my video/picture/music files. I also have a dual freeview card installed so can watch/pause/record TV shows.

Issue 1: I currently have a new Xbox 360 Slim 4Gb in the back of the house with connects to the network via wireless (N). When the Media Centre PC in the front room is switched on the Xbox can ‘see’ it and connect via the Xbox WMC option on the dashboard. Once connected the ‘Network Tune’ tool shows that the network speed is almost maximum (1 bar short of the max, and well within ‘HDTV Quality’). Even though connection speed is so high, navigating the menus is absolute agony. With each click of a button on the remote, a few seconds of anticipation follows followed by a jerky movement to the next menu page. I have ‘unticked’ animations but this hasn’t speeded things up at all. I really thought that a clean PC and a brand new Xbox 360 (also clean) on a Wireless N network would perform better than this. Has anyone else had this issue, and more importantly has anyone successfully resolved it?

Issue 2: My second issue is that in order to connect the Xbox in that back room the screen has to be on in the front room. I have the Media Centre PC connected via HDMI to a Samsung 32” LCD but when this is turned off the Xbox in the other room loses connection?

Thanks for any help, Chris

 

[iminhull]

I have exactly the same situation with navigating the menus being absolute agony. Did you find a solution?

 

[Shark007]

I have read elsewhere (I dont have a link handy)
that disabling Network Throttling is the answer.

Google is your friend.

 

[iminhull]

I've tried that. Thanks anyway. Looked everywhere for an answer. I have just done an experiment and it would appear that my Solwise 200mbps HomePlug devices are causing the problem. Just put the xbox and the server in the same room and it was so much better. Gonna have to rewire the house! Thanks for answering so quickly.

 

[ChrisBurton]

Hi,

In the end I routed CAT5 cable around my house and connected the 2 XBox's this way. Media centre and wireless = problems (even dual band N). The results are about an 8.5 out of 10. Still get the odd network performance issue (even wired.... I must be missing something!) but that's about it. Menues are responsive enough but still noticably laggier than on the main PC. One issue I do have is that whe I try to access my music collection (12K tracks in 1200 albums) the Xbox crashes and needs to be taken back to dashboard. Not good at all. Any advice would be welcome.

If Microsoft gave network parameters to best suit media centre networks everyone would do it!

Thanks,


Chris

 

[iminhull]

Unfortunately I can't help on the music front. I have 4k+ albums (some 57k songs) and after the xbox was given most of the afternoon and the evening, it was able to see them all.
So at the moment the xbox is in the bedroom attached to an old crt and performs okay, but if I move it downstairs I can plug it into out HDTV, but it so painful to use. Shame.