Windows Media Player 11 Won't Stream Video to Xbox 360

One of the more disappointing things about the Xbox 360 is its very limited streaming video options. Without hacking, it has only been possible to stream video from a Media Center PC, and even then, it has only supported Windows Media Video, MPEG and related formats (DivX and Xvid are not supported, for instance). While Microsoft does offer some streaming capabilities with Windows Media Connect for Windows XP, those are limited to music and picture playback and presentation in most configurations.

With this week's release of Beta 2 of Windows Media Player, Microsoft caused a little bit of excitement in the so-called blogosphere with this quote:

If you have a home network (wired or wireless), you can use Windows Media Player 11 to stream the contents of your library to networked devices. For example, if you have an Xbox 360 or other digital media receiver (DMR), you can use Windows Media Player to stream music, pictures, and videos from your computer to that device.

The upshot was that you could use WMP to stream video to an Xbox.

After seeing this touted at a few other sites, I decided to fact check it and drop Microsoft a line. The bad news is that it was an error on their part. While WMP does support Windows Media Connect for pictures and music, video is not supported.

Sorry for this bit of anti-news, but a few of you sent it in and I thought it merited clarification.

News-Source: arstechnica.com