If you just want to play Xvid (and WMV) – then simply install WMP 11, and in the Tools->Options, Library->Sharing, share to your 360. Then simply add your media directory to your WMP library. Pretty easy.

If you want more features (namely transcoding of unsupported media files), and are happy to do a bit more setup, then install TVersity. Use my guide, and the TVersity Quick Start Guide. For me this worked easily on XP (don’t forget your firewall settings!) but it can be a real pain on Vista. My brother finalled managed to get it to work, following the steps here (also copied below after the jump).

From damcio

For anyone trying to get Tversity work on Vista 64BIT (im 100% sure this will help on 32bit also).

If you have any problem try this tutorial (sorry for no pics I don’t have english windows so I’m also kinda translating the options names):
1.Create new account in Control Panel\Users accounts and name it tversity (it is a matter of choice but this will help you organize things if you have multiple accounts on one pc.)
2.YOU MUST make a password for this account. I made “1″ for a password so I could quickly log on.
3.Also it should have admin privileges.
4.Goto Administrative Tools\Services
5.There look for Tversity Mediaserver service and double click it.
6.Select the Logging tab.
7.Tick the “This account” selection and right next to it write .\tversity and for password write “1″ (If you made different info in your account login and pass will be of course different).
8.Click ok, and on the left side of Services window there will be “Restart” option. Click it and let mediaserver restart.
If you want subtitles you have to configure ffdshow or other subtitle filter you have on the tversity account.
Also don’t panic if you can’t configure TVersity on tversity windows account (kinda confusing eh?). It is not supposed to do so. You need to configure and add media from your other accounts, but most likely your first admin account.

This solution helped me with two issues. First I did not have subs, now I have. Second my songs had doubled length eg. 2 minute song went for 2 minutes but after that I had 2 minutes of silence because PS3 thought that song lasts for 4 minuts.
I hope this will help for some of you.

I found it very informative, and got more out of the relatively small (in a global sense) conference than expected. Tom from Tantalus kicked it off, detailing the GDAA’s efforts to extend the “screen” tax breaks currently applied to film, to games. This was followed by a typically ‘as low level as it gets’ PS3 talk, a free lunch (ok, included lunch), and a rather more interesting talk by Peter Isensee about Multi-core programming, including some easy ways to make a game multi-threaded (starting with separating update and draw into separate threads, and continuing with thread job-pools, Double-buffering update/draw and even a sub-frame buffer pipeline for enhanced responsiveness at the cost of programming flexibility). Asserting on non-ownership of objects in setters I thought was another good tip.

Peter is Director XNA Development Connection and was a good speaker. He plugged an XNA Event that was to be held just down the road in Microsoft’s southbank meeting office. Being very interested in XNA, as a hobby game platform, learning tool and commercial prototyping tool, I attended. It was a fun night, we heard more from Pete, and Nic from the Sydney office, and Glenn Wilson, an MVP. There was a good turn out, probably 20 or so, ranging from hobbiest who had not yet used XNA, to those that had, to people in the industry. The pizza was good too :) All in all a fun night, and I’m looking forward to continue playing with XNA.

Astute readers may have noticed a rather pro-Microsoft tone in the previous paragraph. I may as well admit that I’m a bit of a convert. It is hard to deny what they are doing with the 360 – not only is it a good, easy to develop platform, but their representives and support is excellent too. The fact that they allow *anyone* (for a small fee) to make games that run on the 360 (with a few limitations), is amazing. This is very very unusual for game hardware vendors. Companies such as Sony and Nintendo, and most that had gone before try very hard to keep out unlicensed developers. Granted, you can’t actually sell an XNA title for the 360 – but you can make them and play them, and pitch them. It is a winning strategy for MS too – by XNA being used by many universities, there will be a lot of young people who have X360 experience, further lowering development costs for that platform.

Had a good chat to the IBM guys, who were there spruking the Rational suite. Managed to get a good swag – 2 free t-shirts (one for our QA lead), a nice pen, a sweat band, and a table top arcade gaming machine (which I won)!!

All up it was a great two days, and winning the IBM raffle capped it off.

Also:
Hitler’s Xbox gets banned
Sarge
Halo suicides: 1 2

/me wonders if I should just make this an xbox blog?

Today Microsoft added MPEG4 support, through which Xvid playback is now possible. Their move follows a recent update on the PS3 to support DivX. So now everyone is happy. This is good news indeed, as it means the X360 can play Xvid from any source, including the internal HDD, a networked computer (without having to transcode), and best of all burnt DVD’s. Not only that, but it can handle high resolutions, and upscales nicely to 1080p using the hardware upscaler that does such a nice job on DVD movies.

All you need to do is download a 3MB update, the first time you try to play an Xvid file.

The 360 certainly just got a whole lot better as a media device!

Here’s how:

1. Install Windows Media Player 11
2. Install TVersity (install the ffshow codecs when prompted, default settings should work)
3. Open port 41952 in your firewall (if Windows Firewall, unblock TVersity and also add the port using “Add Port”)
4. Visit http://localhost:41952/ to view TVersity. You may need to reboot before doing this.
5. In TVersity settings, select Xbox 360 as playback device, and under transcoder, increase resolution to 640×480 (if you have a semi-decent computer)
6. Disable all other media sharing programs and connect to your PC from your 360

TVersity also installs a new right click option in explorer which is “share this folder with TVersity” which is extremely convenient.

References:
Quick Start
Playing DivX and Xvid content on Xbox 360 – An easy guide!
WMV coming to 360, can TVersity support it and transcode? (a bit out of date, see update)