How to improve streaming media to an Xbox

[Tom]

When I was staying at Lazy's and Rae's for the month there, I tried setting up a UPNP media server on my laptop so we could watch some of the videos I brought. I only found one open source UPNP media server that even supported the xbox 360's quaint version of the UPNP protocol, and then I never did manage to get it to transcode properly. It'd show the movies, but when I tried to play, the 360 would complain that it didn't support the format

Sad, because this laptop is powerful enough to decode, then reencode most videos. Though it'd have had some fun doing some 1080p h264.

That sort of setup would save from having to bother to manually re encode. Though you might need some beefy hardware to manage the higher quality files.

[Lazybones]

An alternative to HandBreak is Quick Media Converter  http://www.cocoonsoftware.com/#us but I prefer HandBreaks UI.