Using and External HD with xbox360

[u4ic_fln]

I bought a new external HD yesterday with the intention of storing old movies on there. I want to access the movies using my xbox360 but I'm not sure how to do that. When i plug in the HD to my xbox it looks like it detects it, as i am able to format it (using the xbox) to save games on there. But I cannot access the file system just like i would through windows. Any ideas how I can make that happen?

 

[Yami]

Is the drive formatted as FAT32 or NTFS? I know you can do what you're after when the external HDD is formatted as FAT32, but I'm not sure about NTFS.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Needs to be FAT32, and the partition can not be larger than 16GB if I remember correctly. Have you considered transcoding your movies?

 

[Yami]

Have you considered transcoding your movies?

+1 to this. There's a 360-specialised .avi format - use a program like Handbrake or Xilisoft Video Converter. They have an option to do it in said format.

 

[KSoD]

http://www.techist.com/forums/f38/daniusoft-video-converter-ultimate-review-235555/

There is also Daniusoft that does it. Could just leave everything on your PC and connect to it with your XBOX using something like PlayOn or TVersity.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

I personally use PS3 Media Server, takes a decent rig to run it, but it will re-encode any movie on the fly for the xbox, so far, it has been flawless, just need a system and hard drive that can do it.

 

[forrestcupp]

Well, this is an old thread, but if you have your movies on a Windows computer on the network, your 360 can connect to that computer's Windows Media Center and play any movie that WMC can play. I have a 2TB external hooked up to a network computer just for that purpose. That computer is hooked up to my main tv by hdmi so I can watch those movies, but I can also watch those movies on another tv that my 360 is hooked to. You just sync WMC on the 360 to your computer's WMC.

I've even watched two different movies on both TVs at the same time all being processed by that computer. It took me forever, but I dumped all of my DVDs to that external HD.