In fact, I kept seeing menu options on the Xbox 360 for videos and "Media Center." I was curious about this and decided I wanted to dive in a little bit more to see what I could do with those options. The most information out there pertained to the fact you could download videos to the Xbox 360's hard drive. But, back then, the biggest hard drive you could get for the Xbox 360 was a 20 gigabyte one - hardly enough for a video collection!
About the same time, I had also noticed that my Windows Vista PC had a Windows Media Center built into it, but I didn't really have a use for it. I did some Googling and found that Windows Media Center and "Media Center in the Xbox 360 were one in the same. While I didn't have a TV tuner in my Vista box, I solved this quickly by picking up a USB HDTV TV Tuner stick to bring in over the air television broadcasts from my local television stations.
Converting my desktop PC into my Media Center PC was a breeze. I set up a few programs to record with the TV Tuner and I was on my way. Connecting the Xbox 360 to my Media Center PC was easy as well.
Back then, everything was basic - I had my Media Center PC recording live tv and it was streaming that content, including live TV (who watches live TV anymore, anyways!?!?) to my TV in my living room. Comparing my experience to that of Dish Network's DVR was pretty much the same - except it didn't cost me a dime in monthly service fees.
So - over the next couple of months, I "beta tested" the whole setup in the living room while using our Dish Network DVR in the bedroom at night. Things kept getting better and better as time went on. I started to realize I could stream more than live and recorded TV to my living room, but I could also convert DVD's to either .ISO's or .AVI's and watch those over my home network as well.
As time went on, I became more and more sure that we were ready to cut the cord and decommission our Dish Network service. I actually had a pretty bad back injury and was scheduled for surgery and would be confined to bed for a couple of weeks. Knowing this, I didn't really want to move my Xbox 360 upstairs. I decided it was time to either find an inexpensive "Media Center Extender" or find a used Xbox 360 to put up in the bedroom. I found a refurbished one on the Internet and got it a few days before my surgery. Getting it set up was a breeze and I was in business. After only a few days of using this in the bedroom, did I realize it was in fact time to turn Dish Network off!!!
Fast forward a couple of years now and look where I am now! I've expanded my Media Center PC to be running on a Windows 7 Ultimate PC and now have two USB HDTV TV Tuners - allowing me to record two separate shows at the same time!
I've also expanded my PC setup. I now have a Windows Home Server hosting up 6 terabytes of storage across three external hard drives. This array is actually redundantly backing up all of my family pictures across the drives, as well as storing all of my music collection, movie collection, and backing up all of the computers connected to my home network! Connected directly to my Windows 7 Ultimate TV is a 2 terabyte hard drive dedicated solely to storing my recorded TV shows at 1080p resolution. I remember looking back to my Dish Network DVR and worrying with my wife on what shows we either had to delete or watch before we ran out of room on our DVR. Now - I've got storage that I am in no danger of running out of in the near future.
But wait! That's not all!!! Not only am I able to stream my own content, but I am also able to stream content that resides on the Internet. While Netflix and Amazon are both supported by the Xbox 360, I am choosing to go the most economic route. These are pay services. I found a service - Media Mall's PlayOn that streams not only Hulu content, but content from many other providers.
This is a service that runs in the background on your computer and is recognized on your network by your Xbox 360 (or Playstation 3, Wii, and more recently Google TV). PlayOn not only natively supports streams from many providers such as CBS, MTV, PBS, YouTube, CNN, Crackle, and others, but it also supports third party plugins allowing me to view content from the History Channel, Comedy Central, Spike TV, SyFy, Fox News, Nick TV, Discovery Channel, the CW, and more!!! I was lucky enough to get in on the bleeding edge of this software back when Hulu was about the only streaming option. Just several months ago, they even released an iPhone and iPad application, allowing me to watch all of this content from anywhere in the world! I have been able to see them grow like crazy and am a huge fan of them.
So... while I am probably by no means an expert in this area, I do think I'm a pioneer in my own right in the arena of becoming my own Cable TV provider. While we still do need to pay for Internet service, we have been able to cut out television service proper.
Coming up - My review of the Western Digital TV Live Plus media streamer. My refurbished Xbox 360 in the bedroom recently went all RROD on me resulting in me resorting to my iPad for streaming through PlayOn.. although this is great, it stands to reason that if you have a 46 inch TV in your bedroom, an iPad isn't going to cut it for long!!!
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