Be Excellent To Each Other

I have a few films on my laptop that I got from a torrent site, and I have also noted with interest a few comments from you clever chaps on here about watching american tv shows you have got online. I was wondering, how do I watch these films on my xbox or PS3 and where do i find these tv shows? Any pointers? I obviously could watch the films on my laptop but that seems like a waste of all these nice consoles I have. If any of these questions appear to be asking something which is of a dubious legal nature, then just pretend I asked that I have films on my laptop which play on div x which were gifted to me by a mysterious Russian millionare trying to woo me with promises of good films, snow and vodka and im wondering how to watch them.
This is my first new thread!woo. I think i'll end with kisses xxx

I use a usb external hard drive to watch films and tv shows on my xbox, you can stream video and music but I can never get mine to work.

Speaking from personal experience on the Xbox360:

The short answer is it depends on
a) what file type the movies are
b) how you connect your laptop and console together

If the movies are of a file type that an Xbox360 will play and you have Windows Media Center on your laptop, then things are straightforward. Use the wizard on the 360 to find Media Center on the laptop and hey presto. I found a cabled network connection to be necessary for HD content, but SD content will be just about ok on a decent 54g wireless connection.

If the files are not of a type the 360 will natively play then TVersity is probably your best bet. This will decode the files on the laptop and squirt the results across to the 360. Again, a cabled network connection will be needed for HD.

I am lucky to have a laptop with HDMI, so can plug straight into my HDTV, but I use the Media Center method above to stream mp3 through the 360 to my amp and decent speakers. This works fine with wireless by the way.

FAT32 formatted USB drives will work but subject to the files being the right file type and not being bigger than 4Gb (a major issue for HD movies) because of the FAT32 file size limit.

I don't know anything about other consoles as I don't have them, although I think I remember DrGlyndwrPenLlawenShoutSHOUT III that the PS3 is much better at this than the 360.

TVersity is a bit of a fiddle but well documented to tell you how to set it up. It works with everything I ever fed it (which is most *cough*publicly*cough* available video content).

PS I think that Media Center method should work with Windows Media Player 11 using the 360 as an extender if you don't have Windows Media Center on the laptop. Although I have only ever used my Nokia N95 as a Media Center Extender to listen to music (without bass) while I'm performing the three S's.

For 360 and PS3 from a PC over a local network (ie all three are connected at once), TVersity is very much your friend. Most of the other media servers - including Windows Media Center - can't stream to both.

Well, it's very much my friend, at least. It doesn't really get on with Vista so well, but that's fairly simply overcome.

TVersity detects what it's talking to and transcodes your media to a format that the console can understand. It supports as many codecs as you can get drivers for - it includes a very old version of ffdshow, uninstalling that and installing the newest one (from the 'ffdshow tryouts' sourceforge) makes it even better.

Incidentally, video upscaled to 1080p is fine for me, with the consoles wired to my router through 200mbps HomePlugs and my laptop being 54g wireless - about 33% wifi bandwidth use. If the console was wireless as well and/or the signal was 'excellent', it'd probably struggle, with wifi being a half-duplex technology. Transcode+upscale doesn't do more than 25%-ish CPU on my 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo. Doesn't use scads of memory either.

Give me a poke if you want a hand setting it up; it's dead simple though in the latest RC. The instructions say to manually do stuff (like disable the standard SSDP service), but it offered to do it automatically in the installer for me.

It should do, but I am buggered if I can get the fucking thing to work.

I use the PS3 because it's much quieter and copy what I want to watch onto a memory stick rather than spooling as it seems such a waste of energy having the laptop and PS3 on when I can just play it off one device.

As regards finding stuff I use easynews.com costs about £6 a month but you can find almost anything using their search facility and the downloads are invariably quicker than any torrents.

I would've thought the quickest way to do it is to drop the files onto a USB stick. If it's a Divx or Xvid file then it should be playable on either the 360 or PS3. If it's a high-definition MKV file then mkv2vob will convert it into a format suitable for playing on the PS3. You can use mkv2vob to convert it into a file that the 360 can play but it'll take longer (as it has to re-encode the video, which it doesn't have to do for the PS3).

Personally I'm more than happy using an old Xbox and XBMC for most of my media playing (due to its ability to play DVD images off network drives, subtitle support, etc.) although it helps that I don't have an HDTV so don't have any high-def files to watch -- if I did then I'd be looking at getting one of those WD high-def boxes, a Popcorn Hour, an AppleTV (to hack with XBMC) or something like that.

As for finding things, as Trousers says newsgroups are awesome although depending on your news server's retention (ie. how long things hang around for) you may struggle to get anything older than 3-6 months. If you happen to have Virgin cable then their newsgroups are operated by a third party (Highwinds) and you get 7-day retention with unlimited downloads (they don't monitor what you download either ) -- the retention is a bit rubbish but if you keep on top of things then you'll be alright (it would more than suffice for keeping up with TV programmes, for example), and unlimited download capacity is very good (many providers do limit how much you can get per month). If you go the newsgroup route then I use newzleech.com to search for NZB files (which tell your newsgroup program the files to download) and alt.binz to download the files. I also use sites like zerosec.ws, scnsrc.net and rlslog.net to keep an eye on what's out there.

Sneakernet'ing a USB stick to the console isn't quicker than streaming, especially if you need to recode, though I'm not sure what TVersity does with MKVs (or ISOs/VOBs, for that matter).

Well last night my gf spent a wee while messing about with the laptops and xbox, i tol her what you guys had said and she managed to set up a home network so now my 360 has got the films playing through it

This is great, thanks for the tips guys, we are doing it through the media centre (i didnt even know that was something we could do) and it looks great. I'm going to have a wee look at the other sites you mentioned as well so cheers!

It's good isn't it!
One other thing you might want to try - download iPlayer programmes as AVIs and the 360 will play those too

Cool! I have only used iPlayer once before or something, I didn't realise you could download them. That is great, I will defo use that!

To download them you need to get "iplayer downloader" from po-ru.com.
If you've got TV and an PVR or video recorder anyway I wouldn't bother with this, but otherwise it's pretty useful - I just download the occasional thing to watch, and you don't have to worry about it vanishing off iplayer, and I hate watching stuff on the computer rather than the TV.

Or save the buggering about and just go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer in your PS3's web browser as the BBC now do a PS3-specific version of iPlayer.

Personally, I use PS3 Media Server to actually stream stuff from my PC to my PS3, it seems to work pretty well and pretty painlessly.

Well, quicker to set up I mean ie. no faffing with fileshares and what have you.