The feature list for the Fall Dashboard update for the 360 is out now, and the big new feature that’s got everyone abuzz is support for DivX/Xvid codecs.
That is indeed awesome, but upon reflection, it doesn’t really do *me* much good. My MythTV frontend is a bit flaky right now and I’d prefer something better, but the 360 can’t stream from MythTV right now regardless of what format the video is in. Other streaming solutions exist, but would require transcoding the video on the fly, which degrades video quality. But, I don’t really want to watch TV on the LCD monitor it’s connected to right now anyway.
The PS3 is in a better position, being connected to the bigger TV and it’s already close to being able to stream from MythTV; it sees the server, but says that the video files are corrupt (choking on the MP2 audio stream, perhaps). DivX support is coming to the PS3 as well, but it’s not clear yet if that will include Xvid as well. But wait, even if it did, I’d have to transcode my MythTV files to Xvid (which is actually easy enough), but then they’ll be stored in a Nuppelvideo container format that neither the PS3 nor 360 will support. Sigh.
One of these days I’m just going to have to tear down my entire home theatre setup and rebuild the whole thing from scratch…