Jealous of your friends’ fancy media centres? You probably already have one!I’m a total cheapskate. If there’s one thing I love, it’s getting stuff for free, and when it comes to my home media setup, I’m all about using what I have.
Although I’d love to buy an Apple TV with ATVFlash and run XBMC in my lounge room, the fact is that if you already have a current-gen HD console and you’re happy to work with their few constraints, you can kill two birds with one stone and can have a great, seamless media setup in multiple rooms without forking out any extra cash.
You may not get the face-meltingly pretty interface of some dedicated systems, but in the end it’s all about getting access to your digital content and playing it back with high fidelity, right? On this front, the Xbox 360 and PS3 have you covered. We’ll talk about using the Apple TV and Mac Mini as home media centres in future articles, which both do a stellar job of taking the home media interface to another level for those who have the time and money to invest. This guide goes out to those whose monthly spending invariably vanishes on video games and the machines that play them, and have not a penny to spare on dedicated hardware.
Capabilities
It’s a great time to be a gamer. We have the faithful brick that is Xbox 360 to feed us constant triple A games and the PS3 rely on when the Xbox 360 inevitably dies by its own sadistic hand (I lost my launch unit to the red rings of death 2 months ago). Both are brilliant machines. Don’t let your nostalgia fool you; this is the golden age of gaming.
But one of the most impressive capabilities of current-gen consoles often goes unused; their ability to play and upscale common formats of digital video (and audio) very capably, allowing your lounge room to be easily turned into a luscious buffet of digital content. Both can process 1080p (full HD) video (providing your network can stream it fast enough) and have excellent upscaling abilities for lower resolutions, offering a functional and attractive interface to navigate your media.
And this doesn’t only apply to Video. It’s possible to easily stream your iTunes music and iPhoto photos to your console using the right software. There are a few restrictions to audio and video playback on consoles:
No DRM-Protected Video Content. All movies and TV shows purchased on iTunes are protected by Apple’s ‘Fairplay’ DRM. This built-in protection layer prevents your content from being played back on unauthorised hardware, which unfortunately includes Xbox 360 and PS3 and most other non-Apple devices. For the future, a good general tip is to never purchase video content from iTunes at all. DRM is the spawn of Satan and the less we spread its infection, the better!- No DRM-Protected Audiobooks. If you’re an Audible subscriber or you buy audiobooks direct from iTunes, these are also DRM-protected files and will not play back on your console.
- Not all video formats are supported. Some less common but rising compressed video formats (like MKV) aren’t compatible with Xbox 360 and PS3. If you stick to common formats like Divx, Xvid and H.264 you’ll stay out of trouble, but you’d be best to have some software tools in your arsenal to do one-off conversions when needed. We’ll visit some of these utilities later on in this guide.
Despite these restrictions, Xbox 360 and PS3 actually support more media formats and codecs than an unmodified Apple TV, which may leave you scratching your head as to why anyone who already owns a HD console would consider the Apple TV at all (although Apple TV does, of course, support purchased DRM-protected content). You wouldn’t be the first to wonder this, which is why more and more people are turning to their consoles for a simple and versatile home media setup.
What You'll Need
The tools you need to get started will depend on whether you’ll be working with your own original media (ripping from DVD) or playing back existing video content in various formats from various sources:
Ripping and Encoding from Original Media
I’m a big fan of owning original media and a painfully fussy A/V purist. I insist on doing all my own rips from original CDs and DVDs rather than trusting those found on the internets, not on principle of legality but on principle of consistent fidelity. Yes, I know, most high quality rips look pretty much the same. But ‘pretty much the same’ and ‘the same’ aren’t the same thing. I have issues... The only thing that escapes my near-obsessive net is TV shows, which don’t get the H.264 treatment unless they merit a lot of re-watching and sharing around.
So let’s walk through the steps required to convert your DVDs to console-friendly H.264 video files, which are currently the standard for high quality video compression and are beautifully up-scaled on either console (in the case of Xbox 360, H.264 can actually end up looking better than the original DVD, since H.264 video is up-scaled but DVD is not. This isn’t the case for PS3, which does an incredible job of up-scaling DVDs)
Ripping DVDs to your Hard Drive
The first step to converting your DVDs to H.264 is to rip the contents of the discs to your hard drive for conversion. This process not only makes the disc contents available to queue and convert in video encoding software, but strips out the their encryption and region coding, which is an essential first step. The 2 best tools for this are RipIt and MacTheRipper.
Ripit is the most compatible (due to its frequent updates) and rips a complete image of each disc, but isn’t free (USD $19.95). MacTheRipper is a freeware alternative which may not have such wide compatibility, but it handily allows you to selectively rip specific titles (such as only the movie itself without the menus and special features), saving rip time and gigabytes. If you have a small collection, MacTheRipper may do the job just fine. For ease of use, however, I recommend RipIt. Apps don’t come any simpler (see below).
Converting Ripped DVDs to H.264 Files
Once you’ve ripped a batch of DVDs to your hard drive (for which you’ll need plenty of space; a dedicated 1TB hard drive is a good place to start for ripping and permanently storing encoded videos - start with three rips as a test), it’s time to start turning them into something the Xbox 360 and PS3 can play back.
You’ll only need one tool for this, and it’s one whose praises are heard from many a rooftop: HandBrake.
[caption id="attachment_5854" align="aligncenter" width="302" caption="HandBrake In Action"]
[/caption]HandBrake has been the weapon of choice for H.264 encoding for years now, thanks to its great presets, gorgeous output quality and even better price... it’s free! For the purposes of conversion for consoles, handbrake operation should be kept simple. Follow the steps below to encode your first DVD rip:
- In HandBrake, click Source to locate and load your ripped DVD image for conversion
- Select the preset Normal under the Regular category in the drawer for widest compatibility (handling of Anamorphic is set to Strict, which is essential for consoles if you want to always maintain aspect ratio).
- Enter destination file name and path in the Destination field
- Under Subtitles, choose the English track and tick Forced Only, regardless of whether or not you remember any subs appearing in the film. There’s nothing worse than getting 80 minutes into a film and reaching a scene with 10 seconds of critical dialogue in another language with no subs! Forced subs will only appear in your rip if they're just that: forced. If they're not played in the movie by default, they won't be in your rip. For foreign films, leave this unchecked to include the whole English subtitle track.
- Click Add to Queue in the toolbar
Repeat these steps to queue multiple rips (I set this up before bed when encoding a list), then click Start in the toolbar to kick off your queue.
A few important notes:
- Encoding in HandBrake will dominate your Mac’s processor/s while the queue is running, so if you’re wanting to do some heavy work on your mac, delay your encodes until a better time (like overnight).
- If the quality you get from the Normal setting isn’t sufficient, try bumping it up in the Video tab under Quality. I use the standard setting for TV shows (1500kbps) and bump it up to 2000kbps for films. These settings will yield roughly 1.5-2GB file sizes for films and 500MB file sizes for 1hr TV episodes on average.
- Any changes you make to settings can be easily saved as a preset by clicking the ‘+’ button in the drawer.
After you've encoded a few files, it’s time to start sharing them over your network!
Sharing Your Media
If you’re working with existing content, you can skip right past the ripping and encoding stage and go straight to sharing your files!
To make the video files stored on your mac visible on your console, you’ll need a piece of software that makes your console see your Mac as a shared PC. My personal recommendations for this are Playback and Rivet. These are almost exactly the same in every function and either will serve you well. I'll use Playback as an example in this guide.
Setting up Playback is easy. After installing, simply add directories which contain movies or TV episodes to the Movies tab (below). Creating separate shares for Movies, TV Shows, Documentaries etc. makes for much simpler navigation on the console side.
Purchased Music
If you buy music on iTunes, you’ll need another piece of software called Connect360 to play them back on your console, which transcodes audio files to MP3 on the fly. If you try to play purchased songs in Playback or Rivet, even if they’re DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks, they’ll be recognised as protected media and rudely rejected on the console side. Bad form.
Although Connect360 is great for sharing purchased music and has the ability to share movies and pictures just like its competitors, I wouldn’t recommend it as a main media sharing app, as Nullriver have been notoriously lazy in updating this app. Their competitors’ features have surpassed Connect360 on every other side for some time now. For example, Connect360 doesn’t support sub-folders, which means all of your movies appear in one directory (not much fun when you have 200+ rips) when you navigate them on your console. Also, no thumbnails are generated for movies. Boo.
Fixing Incompatible Rips
Every now and then you’ll find a movie file that just won’t play back properly (or at all) on Xbox 360 or PS3. There are some easy ways to tackle this. To easily convert the video to a compatible format, try VideoMonkey. The look and feel is familiar for HandBrake users and the Apple TV preset works perfectly for consoles. Simply dump the source file into its main window and choose a destination path and format, and it will do the leg work for you. And it's free!
For more pure conversion of files that simply have incompatible containers (like MKV), use Quicktime 7 Pro to export the video component of the file as an MP4 pass-through and convert the audio to MP3/AAC Stereo (MKV files with 5.1 audio aren’t supported on Xbox 360). Quicktime 7 Pro can do a lot more than you might think!
Watch and Drool
After going through these simple steps, you’ll be able to easily navigate your ripped and downloaded movies, TV shows and music from the familiar interface of your console of choice.
On Xbox 360, navigate from the dashboard to My Xbox > Movies and you’ll see an available share named after your software of choice (e.g Playback: iMac). Drill into this and you’ll see the entire folder structure of your media share with all compatible files displayed. Enjoy!
Turn Your Mac & Xbox 360 or PS3 Into A Media Centre