pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/ps3_video.jpg" width="800" height="494" style="display:block;float:none;" /If you're here reading Gizmodo, there's a good chance you have a hard drive full of video somewhere. And you also probably have a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. If those two things aren't working together for you in beautiful symbiosis, allowing you to watch all of your downloaded or ripped video on your TV instead of hunched over a laptop screen, well, this is the guide for you./p pNow there are two general strategies you can take: physically copying your files to a USB drive, memory card or CD/DVD, which is pretty straightforward, or streaming your video over the network, which is where things get more fun and interesting. So let's dive in./p pFirst things first, codecs. Now that you're all learn-ed on the ways of video encoding thanks to a href="http://gizmodo.com/5093670/giz-explains-every-video-format-you-need-to-know"Matt's Giz Explains from this week/a, the issue of codecs will make a lot more sense. Thankfully, it's not something you have to worry too much about here, because all three consoles can handle a large number of the codecs you will find commonly: AVI, MPEG (1, 2 and 4), H.264, DivX/XviD, and WMV—and if a particular format you want to play isn't supported, it's often possible to convert it to work on the fly. The PS3 also supports AVCHD, a format used by many HD camcorders. Not all formats are supported with every streaming method though, especially in the 360's case, which we'll get to in a second. Now, for getting all those files on the TV./p pNote: if you need to re-encode a video in a different format because it won't play, nothing beats VLC's transcoding wizard. a href="http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch02.html"Here's a guide./a/p pstrongXbox 360: Streaming (PC)/strongbr img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297019303_tversity_01.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="403" style="display:block;" /In typical Microsoft fashion, there are tons of different ways to pull of streaming your video to the Xbox 360—and the only one that's truly comprehensive, in our opinion, comes from a third party. a href="http://tversity.com/"TVersity/a is a free UPnP media server that can manage your video and music files anywhere on your PC and stream them out to your 360 over the network. It will also kindly transcode just about any video you can throw at it into a codec your console can definitely read. You might have to install some additional codec packs here and there for Windows but for the most part, you can forget about worrying about codecs with TVersity. This also allows TVersity to handle files not officially supported by the 360, like MKV containers./p p1. Grab a href="http://tversity.com/"TVersity here/a and install it.br 2. Click the giant plus sign in the top left corner to "Add Your Media Source" - namely, the folder on your PC with all of your videos.br 3. Under advanced options, set your transcoding preferences: "When Needed" will make sure most all of your files play.br 4. In the main TVersity menu, select "Start Sharing"br 5. On the Xbox 360, TVersity will now appear as a source in the Media blade or under My Xbox -gt; Video Library in NXE./p pThe other three options via Microsoft's own various software solutions all have their own drawbacks, which we'll cover here briefly. Our advice? Use them only if you already use the Zune software, Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to manage all of your video./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297041777_windowsmediaplayer_01.png" width="494" height="432" style="display:block;" /strongWindows Media Player 11/strong: WMP 11 can stream out to the Xbox 360 pretty easily. Here is an a href="http://paininthetech.com/2008/01/03/stream-video-to-xbox-360-with-windows-media-player-or-winamp-remote"in-depth guide/a. strongDrawbacks?/strong Somewhat clunky format support. In our tests we could not stream Quicktime video at all, and had inconsistent experiences with MP4 files. MPEG-4 and H.264 support are technically supported via third-party WMP codec add-ons, but even with those, we still had trouble—MP4 files tended to play fine on the WMP 11 end, but not show up as browsable on the 360. Somewhat unbelievably, the Xbox 360 team actually recommends you a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2007/11/30/december-2007-video-playback-faq.aspx"manually rename your unsupported MPEG-4 and H.264 files/a, adding the ".avi" container extension to fool WMP into playing them. This worked occasionally, but not for every file and was generally inconsistent.br clear="all"/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297025800_zune_01.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="338" style="display:block;" /strongZune Software 3.0/strong: Zune offers a much nicer interface than WMP (Settings -gt; Sharing -gt; Add is the extent of the setup), and thankfully supports MPEG4 and H.264 much more consistently. strongDrawbacks?/strong No DivX or Xvid support, which means a huge chunk of your Torrented video probably won't work.br clear="all"/p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297876080_360_MCE.jpg" width="494" height="308" style="display:block;" /strongWindows Media Center Extender/strong: If you already have a Media Center setup honking on your network, there's a good chance you won't need this guide, but the Xbox 360 can of course stream your MCE content to your TV seamlessly (a a href="http://features.teamxbox.com/xbox/1392/Xbox-360-Windows-Media-Center-Setup-Guide/p1/"complete guide is here/a). The interface is really fantastic. strongDrawbacks?/strong The gimpiest codec support of the bunch: only MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV are supported. So unless you're converting everything you have into those formats, you'll still need something like TVersity to play most files you'll find up for download.br clear="all"/p pSo, in the end, TVersity wins hands down as the easiest and most elegant streaming setup for the 360. But do keep in mind—if you're playing a format that your Xbox can't handle (MKV being the most common of these you'll find), TVersity will have to transcode, which means you will lose a bit of quality./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297010629_connect360_01.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="494" height="378" style="display:block;" /strongXbox 360: Streaming (Mac)/strong: UPnP support—the networking standard used by both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in various flavors to play network-streamed video, music and photos—is not natively supported by OS X yet. And unfortunately, there isn't a stellar all-in-one free package like Windows' TVersity.br clear="all"/p pNullriver, however, makes an incredibly slick piece of software called a href="http://www.nullriver.com/products/connect360"Connect360/a, which easily streams all of your iLife libraries or any folder full of video on your Mac to the 360. Unfortunately, it'll cost you $20. There is a free trial version that supposedly shuts off after 30 minutes of sharing, but sometimes it seems to forget and lets you play longer. But even so, $20 isn't bad for the convenience factor here. No transcoding, but it will handle every codec the console itself can play back./p p1. Download and install the Connect360 preference pane.br 2. In System Preferences, start up Connect360 sharing. Here you can also add folders for more sharing.br 3. Access the Connect360 source on your Xbox in the usual way. Done./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227301048351_xbox_video.jpg" width="494" height="329" style="display:block;" /strongXbox 360: Physical Media/strongbr 1. If streaming isn't for you, and you don't mind hauling a storage device back and forth between your computer and Xbox, then this is super easy: Insert Flash disk/USB/CD/DVD and browse it with the Media blade or the Video Library section of NXE (under "My Xbox"). Enjoy.br clear="all"/p pstrongPlaystation 3: Streaming (PC)/strongbr strongTVersity/strong: Again, Tversity is your friend. It works just as well for the PS3 as it does for Xbox 360 (see above for setup)./p p1. With Tversity set up and sharing turned on, just browse to COMPUTERNAME: TVersity in the XMB and you'll see a listing of all your shared files./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/ps3_wmp11.png" width="500" height="371" style="display:block;" /strongWindows Media Player 11/strong: Just like for Xbox 360, you can use WMP11's built-in DLNA/UPnP serving capabilities to stream to the PS3, too—but with the same codec funkiness as noted above.br clear="all"/p p1. In the Media Sharing preference box with your PS3 powered on and connected to the network, select "Unknown Device"—that's your PS3.br 2. Your library should now show up in XMB./p pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1227297942918_Picture_26.png" width="494" height="405" style="display:block;" /strongPlaystation 3: Streaming (MAC)/strongbr Mac: Nullriver didn't just hook up 360 owners—Media Link is the version especially for PS3. It costs 20 bucks, but will give you totally seamless and painless streaming of all of your iLife libraries (photos and music too) as well as files in any folder you can access with your Mac, whether it's on a network or local.br clear="all"/p p1. Operation is just like Connect360—with sharing enabled in the Media Link preference pane, just browse through all your files under the "Media Link" source in XMB./p pstrongPlaystation 3: Physical Media/strongbr 1. Easy as pie. If you're using a USB flash or hard disc or an SD or CF card, just dump all of your videos into a folder named VIDEO on the root of the drive and they'll show up automatically in the XMB.br 2. You can also browse the entire drive or disc by pressing triangle and choosing "Display All" to find videos that aren't in the VIDEO folder./p pstrongWii: Physical Media/strongbr img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/10/wiihomebrew6.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" style="display:block;" /For playing video on your Wii, physical media is the way to go, which is easy to pull off with some a href="http://gizmodo.com/5096150/a-complete-guide-to-playing-video-files-on-your-ps3-xbox-360-or-wii-/?op=postpreviewrefId=5096150"homebrew hacking/a. There are lots of services that will transcode your video and ouput it in a Flash player that you can view through the Wii's Opera browser (like a href="http://orb.com"Orb/a), but you'll take a hit quality-wise and it's not as easy as just playing the source files directly with Mplayer.br clear="all"/p p1. Install the Homebrew Channel and Mplayer on your Wii. We've got you covered here with our a href="http://gizmodo.com/5096150/a-complete-guide-to-playing-video-files-on-your-ps3-xbox-360-or-wii-/?op=postpreviewrefId=5096150"complete Wii homebrew guide/a—but hopefully you haven't installed the latest System Menu update. In that case, you'll have to wait for a workaround, but it probably won't be long./p p2. Install Mplayer via the Homebrew Browser (also a href="http://gizmodo.com/5096150/a-complete-guide-to-playing-video-files-on-your-ps3-xbox-360-or-wii-/?op=postpreviewrefId=5096150"covered in our guide/a)./p p3. Now, you can use Mplayer to play files off or even an attached USB drive (as long as its formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, which most are). The interface is not nearly as nice, but it gets the job done./p p4. Mplayer for the Wii covers a ton of codecs, but sadly, the Wii's processor chokes on HD content. If you've got HD files, you'll need to transcode them into a lower resolution with VLC./p pAnd that's about it. Now, no more huddling around your laptop screen or fiddling with TV and audio-out cables. Welcome to the good life./p pemAdditional reporting and testing by Seung Lee. See more a href="http://gizmodo.com/tag/how_to"Giz how-to guides here/a. And as always, if you have anything to add to our findings, please let us know in the comments./em/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=a5f8e7e6b714214c9acf57feb2a23015p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=a5f8e7e6b714214c9acf57feb2a23015p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=a5f8e7e6b714214c9acf57feb2a23015" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=2Sprc4If"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=B7Ld3MDr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FGGqQmpb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=FGGqQmpb" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=ihusyPJE"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=ihusyPJE" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/7dHhmHJCNb8" height="1" width="1"/

Codecs Vista pour Windows Media Player [Lire la suite]

div class="imajsol"img src='http://www.bildirgec.org/imaj/ekuplu/windowsmediaplayerlogo.jpg' alt="Windows Media Player a Hayır !" border="0"brWindows Media Player a Hayır !/divNeden bilmiyorum çevremdeki amiyane tabirle "bilgisayardan anlayan" grubuna girenler ben de dahil olmak üzere a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx"Windows Media Player/a kesinlikle kullanmıyoruz. Hatta bazen ön tanımlı olup yanlışlıkla açılınca tahammül edemeden kapatıyoruz. Media Player in eksileri saymakla bitmez, tercihini farklı oynatıcılardan yana kullanmak isteyenler için a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-free-media-players-for-windows/"burada/a strongücretsiz alternatifler/strong açıklamalarla sunulmuÅŸ. strongVLC Media Player, Media Jukebox, Songbird, Winamp/strong ve strongKMPlayer /strong ın bulunduÄŸu listeye gelin birlikte göz atalım. pa href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/windows-icin-en-iyi-5" devamını oku »/a/ppstrongilgili yazılar/strongullia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/eklenti-ile-ses-seviyesini-yukseltmek"Eklenti Ä°le Ses Seviyesini Yükseltmek/a (7)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/bs-player-pro-2-28"BS Player Pro 2.28 Build 964 Türkçe/a (0)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/msn-ne-dinliyorum-ozelligi"MSN "ne dinliyorum özelliÄŸi"/a (15)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/sarki-sozleri-icin-minilyrics"Åžarkı sözleri için "MiniLyrics"/a (11)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/alternatif-mp3-calicilar"Alternatif Mp3 Çalıcılar/a (21)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/microsoft-ve-ucretli-programsiz-bilgisayar-1"Microsoft ve Ücretli Programsız Bilgisayar/a (35)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/sarki-sozu-eklentisi"Åžarkı Sözü Eklentisi/a (6)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/messenger-icin-ne-izliyorum-eklentisi"messenger için "ne izliyorum?" eklentisi/a (10)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/yeni-winamp-5-531"Yeni Winamp 5.531/a (0)/lilia href="http://www.bildirgec.org/yazi/winamp-ve-wmp-ile-sarki"Winamp ve WMP ile ÅŸarkı sözlerine ulaşın/a (3)/li/ul/ppbu yazı a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/uye/ekuplu"ekuplu/a tarafından bildirgec.org adresli sitede yayımlanmak üzere yazılmıştır. kaynak gösterilmeksizin kopyalanamaz./ppetiketler: a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/medya%20oynat%C4%B1c%C4%B1" rel="tag" target="_self"medya oynatıcı/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/medya%20player" rel="tag" target="_self"medya player/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/bs%20player" rel="tag" target="_self"bs player/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/winamp" rel="tag" target="_self"winamp/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/kmplayer" rel="tag" target="_self"kmplayer/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/media%20jukebox" rel="tag" target="_self"media jukebox/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/songbird" rel="tag" target="_self"songbird/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/media%20player" rel="tag" target="_self"media player/a, a href="http://www.bildirgec.org/etiket/windows%20media%20player" rel="tag" target="_self"windows media player/a/p pa href="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~a/bildirgec?a=wn5tXf"img src="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~a/bildirgec?i=wn5tXf" border="0"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~f/bildirgec?a=wvcMN"img src="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~f/bildirgec?i=wvcMN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~f/bildirgec?a=egu7N"img src="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~f/bildirgec?i=egu7N" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://rss.bildirgec.org/~r/bildirgec/~4/460423351" height="1" width="1"/

Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.

In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.

Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.

The complete breakdown is below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/codecsarentgoodlkepancakes.jpg" width="807" height="414" style="display:block;float:none;" /Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription that'll work in their media player. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath./p pYou might recall our discussion about a href="http://gizmodo.com/5048025/giz-explains-why-hd-video-downloads-arent-very-high-def"video bitrates earlier/a, or how much data is packed into a file. As a general rule, more bits per second translates into more betterer quality audio and video. The variable in thatmdash;the other part of the equationmdash;is how the content is compressed and de-compressed. Better compression techniquesmdash;the zen of knowing what bits of data to pull out to make big data chunks smallermdash;make for better quality video while taking up less space on your hard drive. Basically, the part you need to know is that codecs are the software that make that magic happen./p pstrongStandard Standards/strongbr bull; strongH.261/strong is not a term you have to worry about, but it's the technology a href="http://www.javvin.com/protocolH261.html"that most video standards and codecs/a were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it's the first major digital video compression standard, and like other "H" standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass./p pbull; strongMPEG-1 Part 2/strong is another oldie, developed by the a href="http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/"Movie Picture Experts Group/a and approved in 1991. (All of the MPEG codecs we talk about, btw, will have an associated layer, since the video section is only part of the full standard, which includes audio and other stuff. MPEG-1 Layer 3, you probably know, is MP3.) Based quite a bit on H.261, a href="http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/research/mpeg/mpeg_overview.html"MPEG-1 was designed to take VHS quality video/a and squeeze it down to a bit rate of about 1.5Mbps, optimized for CD transfers. No surprise, it's the standard used for all VCDs (which can play in most DVD players), but not a standard you would see hanging around today./p pbull; With strongMPEG-2 Part 2/strong, approved in 1994, we're finally talking decent vid. Also known as H.262, since it was developed jointly by the ITU-T and ISO, a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/papers/paper_14/paper_14.shtml"MPEG-2 is an extension of MPEG-1/a that delivers better resolution and higher bit rates (3-15Mbps for standard def and 15-30Mbps for HD). It's the video codec used by DVD and digital television, though now it's slowly being replaced by the more efficient MPEG-4, except on DVDs, where it'll ride out that disc format's lifetime./p pbull; bH.263/b is a href="http://www.phonescoop.com/glossary/term.php?gid=197"designed for sending video over crappy connections/a. So it's used to encode most Flash video and to send video over mobile networks./p pbull; strongMPEG-4/strong is where we really stand right now. It has a much broader scope than past MPEG standards, aiming to tackle both the low end (crappy cellphones on a crappy network) and the high end (Blu-ray). It's still developing, so it's not-so-coincidentally a href="http://www.m4if.org/mpeg4/"where this whole story gets messier/a. There are two relevant parts of the MPEG-4 standard for our myopic video purposes: Part 2 and Part 10mdash;which is also known as H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC). To be clear though, even though they're both part of the MPEG-4 standard, they're itotally different formats/i. Nevertheless, both are more efficient at compression than past MPEG codecs, delivering better quality using less space./p pbull;Okay, so if you've ever frequented a Torrent site, you've actually watched tons of videos that use strongMPEG-4 Part 2/strong, though it's not like they would've had a flashing sign telling you so. MPEG-4 Part 2 actually a href="http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:2-AcZvq6F8YJ:www.mpegif.org/public/documents/vault/m4-out-30037.pdf+mpeg-4+profileshl=enct=clnkcd=4gl=usclient=firefox-a"has different "profiles"/amdash;the two that matter being Simple Profile, for low bitrate, low-res stuff, and Advanced Simple Profile. The latter profile is what's used by movies you would download in formats like DivX or XviD or 3ivxmdash;which are all codecs that are essentially just differing implementations of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard./p pbull;strongMPEG-4 Part 10/strong, the other part, was actually co-devopled by MPEG and the ITU-T, so it's also knownmdash;in fact, more commonly knownmdash;as H.264. It's more efficient than MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, delivering the same quality video in as little as half the space, making it suitable for the low and high-end. Because of this, it's quickly becoming a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC_Products_and_Implementations"the standardest standard/a. It's part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray spec, replacing MPEG-2 in digital TV (like with satellite services and ATT's U-Verse IPTV) and supported by pretty much every portable video player on the planet from the iPod to the PSP. Apple has a decent, if Kool-Aid flavored, a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html"FAQ about H.264/a./p pbull;strongVC-1/strong is essentially a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx"Microsoft developed alternative video codec/a to H.264 released as a standard by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, though it descends from the same H.26X/MPEG family. (It essentially started life as WMV9, but then a href="http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=50500181"Microsoft shopped it to the SMPTE/a to make it an industry standard, and now it is.) It too, is part of the mandatory Blu-ray and HD DVD spec, and is the official video codec of the Xbox 360. It's pitch is the same as H.264'smdash;trying to deliver better quality using less space, like HD video in 6-8Mbps./p pstrongFree-Floating Codecs/strongbr Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of emall of those/em, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (a href="http://www.divx.com/"proprietary/a) and a href="http://www.xvid.org/"XviD/a (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/xbox-360-divx%5Cxvid-test/xbox-360-divxxvid-tested-it-plays-almost-everything-329769.php"Like the Xbox 360/a, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common. Same deal with H.264: Some well known codecs that use it are Apple's Quicktime H.264, x264 and Nero Digital. You've also got Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, which are Microsoft's proprietary twists on industry standards./p pstrongContainers aka Wrappers/strongbr Alright, well you've probably noticed that none of your video files have the extension .h264 or .vc1 or the like. That's because videos are packaged in a href="http://www.doom9.org/glossary.htm#Container"containers or wrappers/a that stuff things like the audio, navigational info, etc. along with the video in a single pretty file. Naturally, there are about as many of them as there are codecs. To be clear, you would take a video encoded with, say, H.264, and wrap it up as a .MP4 file./p pThe majors ones are:br bull;AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is a href="http://www.jmcgowan.com/avi.html#Definition"Windows' standard multimedia container/abr bull;MPEG-4 Part 14 (known to you as .mp4) is the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4"standardized container for MPEG-4/abr ·:FLV (Flash Video) is the a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/"format used to deliver video through Flash Player/abr bull;MOV is Apple's QuickTime a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/"container format/abr bull;OGG is an a href="http://www.xiph.org/"open standard container/abr bull;MKV (Mastroska) a href="http://www.matroska.org/"is another open specification container/a that you've seen if you've ever downloaded animebr bull;VOB a href="http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/vob.cfm"stands for DVD Video Object/a. Guess what? It's DVD's standard container, and what you get when you rip a DVD.br bull;ASF is a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/asfspec.aspx"Microsoft format designed/a for WMV and WMA. (Files can end in .wmv or .asf)./p pSo, in order to play a video file, your setup has to be able to handle both the actual video codec, and the container. It's why you can try to play an AVI file and Windows Media Player laughs at you, even though it totally played one a minute agomdash; the container was no problem, it didn't have the right codec. Or conversely, even though an iPod could play back an H.264 encoded video, if it was wrapped up in MKV, it couldn't read it./p pOkay, my brain hurts. Hopefully this will make yours hurt less when it comes to dealing with pesky videos. If you'd like to do even more homework, Wikipedia, as always, has a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codecs"a more in-depth discussion/a. And Doom9 a href="http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-final-105-1.htm"is always an amazing resource/a for all things digital video./p pemSomething you still wanna know? Send any questions about codecs, kitties or pad thai (but not RealMedia) to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line./em/p p[Image: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siebeneinhalb-de/2385134555/"ME/a@Flickr]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FxSbpUqh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6oQdGflA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=qLBnOvuS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=qLBnOvuS" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=pIR4dxIP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=pIR4dxIP" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/q1B1QOVLsx0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://img.xataka.com/2008/01/xbox360%20grande.jpg" class="centro_sinmarco" alt="xbox360%20grande.jpg"/p pResulta bastante complicado encontrar el strongcentro multimedia/strong ideal, aquel que tenga todas las funciones que deseamos y, además, su precio sea razonable. Ahora que la strongXbox 360/strong dispone del a href="http://www.xataka.com/2008/11/20-bazar-de-video-de-xbox-360-lo-probamos"bazar de vídeo/a, a poco que Microsoft implementara algunas funcionalidades adicionales podría convertirlo en el centro multimedia ideal./p pLa ventaja evidente de la strongXbox 360/strong es que conjuga en un solo dispositivo diversas funcionalidades. Sí, como consola es bastante voluminosa, pero si con ella nos evitamos tener que instalar otros aparatos junto al televisor, este tamaño se ve de sobras compensado.br !--more--/p pDejando aparte las funciones de consola, la strongXbox 360/strong funciona como un reproductor multimedia convencional. Podemos conectarle discos externos a través de sus puertos span class="caps"USB/span y reproducir vídeo, música y fotos desde ellos./p pimg src="http://img.xataka.com/2008/11/xbox-video-2.jpg" class="centro" alt="xbox-video-2.jpg"/p pEn vídeo es compatible, entre otros con DivX, XviD y span class="caps"WMV/span, lo que representa un buen número de los vídeos que nos podamos descargar. Por tanto, llevar el contenido del ordenador al salón es tan sencillo como usar un disco span class="caps"USB/span. Y si disponemos de un iPod, también es compatible con el formato que usa (excepto si tenemos música con span class="caps"DRM/span)./p pPero si la strongXBox 360/strong está conectada a la red podemos aprovecharlo para ni siquiera tener que hacer eso. La integración con Windows Media Player nos permite reproducir el contenido directamente en emstreaming/em. Si disponemos de Linux o Mac OS X también existen opciones para ello, como a href="http://www.nullriver.com/products/connect360"Connect360/a o a href="http://www.twonkyvision.com/"Twonky/a./p pClaro que no todo es ideal. Algunos formatos de vídeo cada vez más usados, como span class="caps"MKV/span, no son compatibles. strongTampoco ofrece soporte para subtítulos/strong, por lo que si queremos utilizar estos es necesario recodificar el vídeo original para añadirlos. Esta es una de las pegas principales para muchos usuarios que descargan series en inglés y quieren verlas con subtítulos./p pimg src="http://img.xataka.com/imagenhddvdxbox.jpg" class="centro" alt="imagenhddvdxbox.jpg"/p pNo hay que olvidar, tampoco, a los formatos físicos, ya que strongXbox 360/strong permite la reproducción de DVDs y de CDs de música, además de contenido digital almacenado en estos. Nos evitamos, por tanto, la necesidad de un reproductor de span class="caps"DVD/span adicional. Lástima que Microsoft apostó a caballo perdedor con el span class="caps"HD-DVD/span, lanzando un reproductor externo para este formato que se vió derrocado por Blu-ray./p pA pesar de los continuos rumores, Microsoft no parece tener ninguna intención de sacar ningún equivalente para strongBlu-ray/strong ni tampoco de integrar este formato en futuras revisiones de la consola. Y viendo las novedades de ayer se entiende porque, no quieren más formatos físicos./p pLo que completa el pack como strongcentro multimedia/strong es el ya comentado bazar de vídeo. Con él tenemos la opción tanto de adquirir contenido en la propia tienda como de obtenerlo en otro lado, siempre que venga sin span class="caps"DRM/span, por lo que no estamos limitados como otras soluciones como a href="http://www.xataka.com/tag/vudu"Vudu/a, con el que solo es posible visualizar el contenido del que ellos disponen./p pUna cosa sí le falta para redondear el paquete, la posibilidad de stronggrabar la televisión/strong. No parece que Microsoft tenga ninguna intención de desarrollar algo parecido al a href="http://www.xataka.com/tag/playtv"PlayTV/a, por lo que si queremos poder grabar la señal de span class="caps"TDT/span deberemos optar por otra opción./p pPara todo lo demás, la consola se presenta como una buena opción como centro multimedia, aunque limitada por la falta de soporte de algunos formatos y por no poder visualizar subtítulos externos a los vídeos. Si Microsoft añadiera estas opciones me tendría el corazón ganado con la strongXbox 360/strong./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/-7EidNe2hLH5LUHIeS4dN7ELKBU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/-7EidNe2hLH5LUHIeS4dN7ELKBU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.weblogssl.com/~f/xataka2?a=xFQ4ZNqo"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/xataka2?i=xFQ4ZNqo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.weblogssl.com/~f/xataka2?a=n9wqHXIx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/xataka2?d=43" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.weblogssl.com/~f/xataka2?a=4OX7SCAz"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/xataka2?d=151" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.weblogssl.com/~f/xataka2?a=ZjNyYR4K"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/xataka2?d=181" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.weblogssl.com/~f/xataka2?a=OTvfbAyK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/xataka2?d=153" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/xataka2/~4/Lyqp1cndNDI" height="1" width="1"/