MacMost Now 117: How to Connect Your Mac to Your XBox 360

Gary Rosenzweig looks at how you can use your XBox 360 to view video and listen to music that is stored on your Mac using Connect360.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
Let me show you how to connect your Mac to your XBox 360.
So one of the cool features about the XBox 360 is the ability to play back media such as music, movies and photos from your local pc.  PC as in a Windows PC.  But have no fear, there's also a way to play back all of the stuff from your Mac as well.
To do this you're going to need to get a special piece of software called connect 360.  You can get it from nullriver.com.  It costs twenty bucks but there's a free trial version so you can see exactly how it works before you purchase.  Once you  download it, it's a preference pane, so it installs in your preferences and it instantly finds everything you've got in your iTunes, iPhoto and movies folders.  It tells you how many things it finds and lets you set some settings as well.  
Next thing you need to do is then turn on your XBox 360.  Now of course, you're going to have to have your Xbox 360 and your Mac hooked up to the same wireless network.  If you don't, all bets are off.  There's probably a way to get it to work by routing things through the right routers but it's going to be a lot more complex.  If they're on the same router though, it should work easily.
So as soon as I turned on the Xbox 360 it instantly appeared on discovered devices. It even made a neat sound to tell me it was connected even though  I was in the other room when I turned the 360 on.  I did have to quit the game that was running and go back to the dashboard before it happened but now the xbox 360 sees all these files.  Let's take a look.
So here I am at my xbox 360 and I need to go over to the Media section and I see there's music, pictures and videos.  I click on music and sure enough, there are the albums from my iTunes collection at my Mac.  I can go ahead and select one and play.
I can go back and look at the photos.  I can even do a slide show if I want.  It also has videos, including the podcasts that were downloadedand  in iTunes on my machine.  
"Hi, this is Gary.  Today on MacMost Now, let's take a look at how..."
So, this is great way to get the content from your Mac onto a tv using xbox 360.  Kind of works just like an apple tv actually.  
I'm really impressed with how easy the connect 360 software is to install and use.  It really just worked automatically.  Now not all movies play back on the xbox 360 and of course music files that are protected on the ac format are not going to play back either but it's a great solution if you don't have an apple tv but you have an xbox 360 in your living room and you wanna connect your mac to it and watch some videos and play some music and show the family the photos.  
Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 117: How to Connect Your Mac to Your XBox 360”

Jonnie Palmer

16 years ago

Hi Gary - Great tip!!!

But can you stream to a Wii. I really want to stream movies - i see there is an app that uses flash but it looks a bit clunky. Is there any software that gives an apple Tv type experience?

Keep on truckin,
Jonnie

kkff

i didnt hear you say '.avi' or 'divx'

will it play those?

rosenz

kkff: Don't know. You usually wouldn't have those in your iTunes library anyway, so it won't be an issue for most Mac users. I guess you could just give it a try.

Jonnie: Have you tried "Wii Media Center X" or "Wii Transfer 2.6"?

Hi Gary, yes I have but on both of those it requires you to convert your videos to flash first. :-(

Jonnie: Interesting. I'll have to look into this. If I find a good way, I'll do a show on it.

winniel

It is easy to play DVD on Xbox 360 with Mac. When Xbox 360 was plugged into a Mac PC, the drive was detected instantly and even directed the DVD player in the OS to play the DVD movie. This is a step by step tutorial on how to play any video file on your Xbox 360 from your Apple Mac computer.

Here are three steps:

Step 1, Convert videos to mp4 format that compatible with Xbox 360 on Mac
Step 2, Connect your Mac and Xbox 360 (Google "iSkysoft video converter for mac")
Step 3, Play Video File on Xbox 360

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