Help! Still trying to get my Xbox 360 to play nice with my PC

December 31, 2006 4:41 AM

Help! Still trying to get my Xbox 360 to play nice with my PC

As a follow up to my previous post about trying to connect my Xbox 360 and PC so I can stream music from PC to Xbox, although I got some helpful links, I am still unable to get them to talk. One of the suggestions from Microsoft was to connect Xbox to PC with an ethernet cable. OK, but I need that ethernet cable to connect my PC to the internet (I don't want to do wireless), can I connect another ethernet card to my PC and have one for the internet and one for the Xbox? Do I need to buy a hub to connect the 2 of them together, or is there a way to do it as long as they're both connected to a router via ethernet cable?

posted by mattholomew to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Link to my previous post.
posted by mattholomew at 4:41 AM on December 31, 2006

I am in the same boat. I have gotten as far as where my Xbox 360 can see my computer and connect to it, but there is never anything there, even though I have gone into the library on Media Player 11 and shared.

I'm curious to the responses you get.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:57 AM on December 31, 2006

You need an Ethernet hub and two extra ethernet cables. (You'll need one cable from the hub to the router, and one each for the PC and the XBox.)

An "Ethernet switch" is the same thing as a hub, but with better performance. They used to cost a lot more, but not so much these days.
posted by Mwongozi at 11:40 AM on December 31, 2006

Your post implies that you have a broadband router, which probably (if its like most consumer routers I've worked with) has an integrated 4-port switch, or better. The simplest, most fool-proof way to get your PC in ethernet communication with your xbox is to connect both your PC and your xbox via patch cables to the ports on your router.

I know nothing about the xbox's network setup, but I imagine if you can get them talking to eachother over wired ethernet, it rules out a lot of 802.11whatever foibles.
posted by Alterscape at 12:14 PM on December 31, 2006

First of all, uninstall any 3rd party music sharing software. (Like TVersity which was recommended in your previous question.) as well as any other media streaming software which may intefere.

Assuming you have XP, you'll need Windows Media Player 11 and enable Media Sharing, and allow your Xbox 360 access to your library.

On your Xbox 360, you go to media->music->computer->windows-based pc, then select your computer.


If you have XP MCE, and want to use the Xbox 360 as an extender to play TV/Music, etc, you'll need Rollup 2 and this (xbox.com)
posted by mphuie at 3:23 AM on January 1, 2007

I've noticed that the 360 can not see any music that isn't local to the machine sharing it; I have all my music on a NAS device, so nothing is shareable. There are several discussions I've seen that suggest that part of the issue lies in authentication difficulties because the service doing the sharing doesn't have the same credentials as the windows account you setup the sharing with, nor even the same network drive letters defined.
posted by nomisxid at 7:24 AM on January 2, 2007

I just got an Xbox 360 too, and I was able to connect to my PC very easily by using a Linksys router. My PC is connected to the router and so is the 360. The next step was to install the Zune software on my PC.

Available here:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/alldownloads.htm

After the install the software did a scan of my connected hard drives and found my Mp3 collections. After that, everything worked fine - with the notable exception of not being able to stream any music that I ripped using iTunes (or music bought from the iTunes store). For those songs I needed to re-rip the CD's - this time using MusicMatch - and everything worked fine.

As a quick side note - I played Gears of War while AC/DC's Hells Bells streamed through the 360 from my PC - it was sublime.
posted by mike0221 at 6:26 PM on January 2, 2007