Another "good" purchase for the Xbox 360: Media Remote

(tags hardware, Xbox 360)

At the shop I picked up this small Microsoft official remote control for about 1200 yen. I thought it was a pretty good deal anyway. I suspect that this remote is supposed to be part of a bundled system, because I've never seen it before.

Its only a good deal because the media controls on the Xbox 360 using a regular game controller are confining. There's no one-touch fast forward or rewind! There's a menu that lets you do that, but that is so idiotically user unfriendly. So here we are with a remote control that can do one-touch fast forward or rewind, which is just extra hardware that makes up for a software design shortcoming. Ugh. Still it's not the complete cat's meow because there's no button for resizing video. Gah.

I spent yesterday night on trying to stream my media from my Windows XP computer (not Media Center). Before the Xbox firmware update 2007-12-04, I used the Zune software as the Xbox recommended. Unfortunately when I upgraded the Zune software, the shares weren't working right. I even had to manually restart the "Zune Network Sharing" service, so the client is pretty iffy. I considered using third party software such as the on-the-fly transcode TVersity but luckily I figured out that Windows Media Player 11 has media streaming. Yes! Delete Zune app for great justice! The shares were also wonky but I fixed it to my current satisfaction.

So I've been watching my previous iPod rips and more importantly, my downloaded game replays and shows on my Xbox 360 despite the fact I don't have a seperate TV. I am reusing one of my monitors in the dual-screen setup, so this is only for those time I am not computing.

Oh yeah, I have to wrap that remote in some kind of plastic wrap. Geez, its really been a long time since I've touch a TV remote of any kind. :-/