New photos from a family celebration, a video from a vacation by the sea or a new album from your favorite artist? Each of us has similar content that we want to show off to visitors or acquaintances, but how to achieve this simply and elegantly if you have an Xbox360 or PS3 at home?
If you have any at home MAC mini connected as a home entertainment center so it's quite simple but what if you own a game console such as a Sony Playstation 3 or Microsoft Xbox360? Standard Microsoft it only supports its own operating system through the program Windows Media Center, which doesn't help us much on MAC. But luckily, there is a convenient software solution for MAC OS X from “The Little App Factory" which is called Rivet.
With this great app, you can access videos, photos and music through your Xbox360/PS3 without any hassles of copying or connecting cables. Your home wireless network is used for sharing. After starting the program, the application icon will appear in the "menu bar" with which we can get to the basic settings.
On the main tab, we can choose which types of multimedia files we want to share. In the "Movies" tab, we can choose to share videos from iTunes, iPhoto, and we can also add any directory located either on a local or shared disk.
The "Display MKV Files" option may evoke their support, but it is only in exceptional cases that you will be able to play them. It didn't work for me even with a single .mkv I have on the disk.
Supported video formats include:
- MPEG-4, Part II
- H.264
- DivX
- WMV
- REVIEWS
But for the latest supported codecs, you have to visit the support of Micosoft or Sony. Bookmark "Music” offers us common setting options such as selecting Playlists or playing only selected songs or only unplayed podcasts. In addition to iPhoto library support, "Photos" also includes Aperture program support, but you will definitely appreciate the definition of specific directories where your photos are stored. An excellent function is the option of choosing the quality of displaying photos. It's definitely a great feature, especially since most of us have photos saved in 6M resolution and more, which has an adverse effect on viewing speed. Even when choosing the lowest quality, I did not notice any degradation of quality on the 42" plasma TV, and the loading speed was satisfactory. It is also worth mentioning the possibility of defining access, i.e. a kind of "access list" (ACL) where we can specify only specific IP addresses or networks that allow access to our files, which you will appreciate and with your MacBookom you also work in public places.
Rivet is also available for your iPad (Rivet for iPad), iPhone, iPod Touch (Rivet for iPhone), which are provided free of charge through iTunes App Store. With their help, we can view the files on the iPad/iPhone display. At these App it's a bit more complicated because, despite multiple attempts, I couldn't get to the files on the MAC either from the iPad or the iPhone. With the iPad, it's probably due to the fact that I'm using it iOS4.2 GM for which there is no app still adapted.
The developer also warns that some of the latest XBOX updates may cause unspecified problems for some users, but they already have Beta version of the program that should solve the mentioned problems. And hence the price $19.95 per Rivet is not high if we realize with a little exaggeration how much the license costs Windows7 to get to the program"Windows Media Center”. But then what else would a tie win be for us? :)
Jan Caran
Is it able to play .srt subtitles on xbox? that's the deciding factor for most people, close the PS3 media server, it's capable, even if I haven't been able to get it to work on the xbox yet
Unfortunately not.
Only if the subtitles were burned into the picture