[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?

[ghporter]

1: the Xbox 360 should need only a network cable to electrically connect to a network. As for the configuration, you would probably want to manually assign an IP address-you can do that with the 360's configuration capabilities.

2: integration with WinXP MCE is part of the Microsoft thing. You probably DO need the Media Center PC to connect to the 360 to do all those things you plan to.