[jmcgee]

Greetings,

Our team takes astrophysical simluations of double-binary mass transfer systems and renders the objects as a concatenated frame-stock, then exported as a Quicktime movie. We will start rendering these in High-Defintion soon in the file formats described below using codecs like H264, Quicktime, MPEG2, etc. We want to stream these Quicktime movies in High Definition to an HDTV using an Xbox 360. Currently, a Mac or PC cannot drive the HDTV at true HD since the digital signal cannot be converted to NTSC interlaced HDTV format. The Xbox360 boasts it can do this with a Windows Media Center PC, but what about Mac!? If anyone can point to a reference or address, phone number (besides Xbox, Microsoft, or Apple customer support), we would be thankful for that.

Goals: The Xbox 360 must be able to ...

1. (Accept)Stream/save to hard disk digital movie formats from PowerMacG5
2. Stream or Playback(from hard disk) digital movie formats to HDTV at its native HD resolution-say of 768i, 1080i, etc
3. Stream/Playback .mov, .m2v, .m4v,etc movie file format

PowerMac G5 I/O:
1. DVI-D
2. Firewire 900, 600
3. 100 MBps Ethernet
4. USB 2.0

HDTV I/O:
1. RGB
2. HD Component
3. Composite
4. S-Video
5. Coax (NTSC)

Questions:

1. If the Xbox 360 can meet our goals, how exactly, w.r.t. hardware/software configuration, will it do this?
2. Is a WindowsXP 2005 w/Rollup 2 update Media Center PC the ONLY way to communicate media through Xbox 360? What about Mac?

[rickey939]

Please do not post across multiple forum topics! My god this is the 5th time I've seen this post already. By no surprise, you only have 5 posts.

[OreoCookie]

First of all, this is a Mac forum, more particularly the PowerMac forum, so if you have any questions regarding the XBox, this is the wrong place to ask.

Then, the XBox 360 has not even been released yet, so even if this were the correct forum, we still could not help you. Microsoft uses proprietary technologies, so I doubt you can easily do anything with it unless Microsoft expressly allows you to do so. If you need a computer to do HDTV streaming, a Mac mini might be worth a look, especially since it probably is not that much more expensive than an XBox 360.

A Mac mini has a standard DVI connector which can drive large displays as well (not a 30" Cinema Display, but the HDTV-capable 23" Cinema Display is supported).