Networking your Home Theatre experience with Your Mac

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easy way to get all of those videos, music and pictures off of your computer over to your Home Theatre system? Many of you out there, know of the extremely easy process of using a Windows Media Centre based PC to stream your media to your H.T. What if you have a Mac?

My Brother and I both ran into this situation earlier this year, we both decided to take the plunge from a lifelong usage of Windows based PC’s to the Apple side of the world. All of a sudden, we were left with many downloaded movies, home videos, music and pictures stranded on our Macs, several feet away from our Home Theatre systems. What were we to do, run a cable across the floor? This is entirely possible as far as music is concerned but what about all of that video and photo.

After doing some searching we found an easy solution. An application called Connect 360 is the solution. Once downloading the application which has a $20 Dollar fee, it will allow you to wirelessly stream your media* from your Mac, to your XBOX 360.

In order to achieve this I have assumed that you have the following

1. A Wireless Router
2. An XBOX 360 Wireless Networking Adapter

You will now be able to browse all of your music, view your pictures, and watch any video content that is on your Mac through your Home Theatre system. This is very convenient if you want to display pictures from a trip on a large TV to a group of Guests.
There are ways to do this with a Playstation3 which will be discussed in a later post.

* As an amendment to the above post. I wanted to mention as it was brought to my attention that the XBOX 360 will not play any music that has been purchased through iTunes as of yet. The reason for this as I am sure some of you are aware, is that music previously purchased on iTunes has been encoding with DRM. I am happy however to inform you that there is already DRM free music on iTunes, and that Apple is likely going to strip all music from the iTunes store from its DRM. I will keep you posted as I learn things.