Connect360 – iLife Meets XBox 360

// January 10th, 2008 // Fun Whatnot

I knew you could connect a Windows Media Center PC to your XBox 360 to extend the available content, but my primary machine at home is a Mac running OS X. This means all the fun media (movies, music, and pictures) is all on there. So after a bit of searching I turned up the absolutely amazing Connect360 by Nullriver Software.

So how exactly does it work and what does it do?

The iTunes integration allows you to browse and play your iTunes music by song, artist, album, genre or playlist. As expected, this allows support for listening to your iTunes songs while playing a game. It even updates your iTunes play count and play date for songs played on your Xbox 360.

In addition, Connect360 supports streaming of live Internet radio broadcasts by simply addind any station to a playlist

As for iPhoto, you can view your photo library, browse by photo album or watch a slideshow.

Any movies in your movie folder become available for viewing in full screen.

Connect360 supports the following formats:

MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and Apple Lossless for Music. For Photos, Connect360 supports: JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF. For video streaming, currently only WMV+WMA, AVI (DIVX/XVID), H.264 and MPEG4 files are supported (in MP4 and MOV containers).

On top of all this sweetness, it also does “automagic transcoding”. With this feature, it can do on-the-fly automatic transcoding of many formats so that you can enjoy even more content on you Xbox 360.

As for setup, you drop a new control panel on your Mac and this Connect360 software will automatically detect your Xbox 360 and in turn your 360 will automatically detect your Mac and the media made available to it.

The demo is free, and the full version is merely $20, so if you have this setup, try it out, you won’t be sorry.

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3 Responses to “Connect360 – iLife Meets XBox 360”

william says:

February 10, 2009 at 1:43 am

i bought the connect 360, and have it set up. i can play all my songs and everything, but the movies, tv shows, and music videos that i bought will not play on the xbox 360. i have downloaded the new update thing onto my xbox, and it still doesnt work. what do i do?
Ant says:

February 8, 2010 at 12:46 pm

Can anyone help? I only have a trial version of at the moment, only 5 in my folder are displayed, does the fully licensed version show the whole movie folder contents?
iMac Refresh Imminent - Page 2 says:

April 27, 2011 at 7:00 am

[...] without issue?? Or is DMA access to such devices a no go? As far as Xbox 360 integration goes, this is what I found. I honestly haven't seen it or used it because I don't own an 360, but you could [...]

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