ITVCasting with WMV files

Introduction

There are large number of videos available for download from the internet. Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 is very picky about what kind of videos it can play. (For more basic information about video playback on the Xbox 360, please see this FAQ.)

Many of these videos, including popular formats like Divx, Xvid, MPEG-4, Quicktime and H264, are unplayable on the Xbox360 without transcoding them first using an application like Videora Xbox360 Converter. The good news is that the popular Windows Media Video (WMV) is playable directly though the Xbox Media Center Extender, without any extra steps or transcoding.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could automatically download these WMV videos to your Media Center PC for later playback on your Xbox 360? Well now you can.

Welcome to the era of Internet TV Broadcasting (ITVCasting for short). You can now automatically download WMV video files to watch on your Xbox360, at your convenience with one easy to use program, Videora.

Getting Started

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to automatically download one of our favorite Internet TV shows, DigitalLife TV, for playback on the Xbox 360. This page shows all the different video feeds for DigitalLife TV. Remember that the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender can only play WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files, so make sure the feeds you subscribe to have videos in one of these formats. Otherwise you will need the Videora Xbox360 Converter to play them back.

First you'll need to get yourself a copy of Videora (either the free trial or the full version) and install it on to your computer. Once you've started Videora up, all you need to do is follow these 3 simple steps.

1. Add the Feed

From DigitalLife TV webpage, we've determined that the WMV Feed we want is at this URL: http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/audioblogs/DLTV.wmv.xml
Go to the RSS Feeds section, enter this URL in the "Enter Feed URL:" textbox and click the "Add Feed" button. Once the feed is properly downloaded you can click on the feed name and view the contents of the feed.

2. Create a Season Ticket

To automatically download every episode of DigitalLife TV you need to create a Season Ticket. To do this simply right click the feed name and click the "Add to Season Ticket" menu item.

3. Create a New Download Location

By default, Videora places all its web downloads in the Downloads folder of the Videora program directory (C:\Program Files\Videora\Downloads\). In order for the videos to show up in the My Videos section of Media Center, they need to be placed into another folder (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos). Videora can do this automatically by creating a new Download Location item. Go to the Downloads section and the Location tab. Click "New Location Item" button, specify a name, change the feed the to "dl.tv in WMV", set the "Destination Folder for Downloads" to a folder in your My Videos directory and finally click the "Add Location Item" button.

That's it. Videora will now automatically download the WMV videos and place them in you're my Videos folder automatically. Viewing these files on your Xbox 360 is as simple as starting up Media Center from the Media Blade in the Xbox 360 Dashboard, going to the My Videos section of Media Center and navigating to your video.