Back when the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was helping hundreds of thousands waste their precious youth on video games, emulation was a big thing among those who wanted to expand on the console gaming experience.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
These days, it’s all about how one can push their actual console to new limits. Encode360 is a new tool that hopes to help XBox 360 owners get that much more out of the console that parted them from their cash.
Encode360 promises to encode just about every video file into a compliant WMV (Windows Media Video) file for the XBox 360 or Zune video player. This is allowed to occur thanks to a recent firmware upgrade to the XBox 360 that allowed streaming to occur of WMV files with particular requirements over a LAN connection.
Of course, there’s more to being able to play media on the console. Encode360 rescales the resolution so that no stretching occurs in the process, keeping as much of the quality as possible in the process.
There’s even a folder monitoring option that allows for automatic encoding. For instance, if a user has set up an RSS feed reader in their BitTorrent client to automatically download the latest episode of Diggnation and wants to watch it on his or her XBox 360, Encode360 will simply wait for the file to complete, then automatically encode the completed file for streaming.
Encode360 is rapidly developing and is a not-for-profit project. It’s a community driven project that has been developed by Dan Cunningham. It’s new, so there’s still an issue or two being worked on. More information can be found in Encode360’s press release. The website can be found here.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
