Windows 7 Media Center SLOW with Xbox 360

FutileBreadMachine · 17 Aug 2009 at 11:52

Hi all

I've been trying to use Windows 7 Media Center with my Xbox 360 to stream music and movies to my TV, but the performance is awful. I'm using Windows 7 Professional 64bit and navigating the menus for my music just hangs for about 10 seconds before it responds. I've done the network test in Media Center and it says it's good enough to stream TV quality video, so MP3s should be fine. I found a few posts on the net about this exact issue, but no solutions, so I thought I'd ask if anyone here has experienced this. Could be a driver issue with the Media Center 2007 driver maybe? I have a Q6600 at 3Ghz, so the CPU isn't an issue, and I'm connecting to the Xbox through my router via CAT5, which is in turn connected to my PC by a homeplug at 85Mps.

ChileanLlama · 17 Aug 2009 at 12:16

Has the W7MC PC built it's library and indexed all your content? If you change your content a lot it will always have to initially index and rebuild the library - first time is the worst though.

FutileBreadMachine · 17 Aug 2009 at 13:09

Yeah, when I first started it up it had a little box in the corner saying it was adding content to the library and I waited till it was 100% before using the interface. I don't have gigs and gigs of media either, I mainly want it to work for music, but when I got to music and it shows all the album covers, the whole thing starts to hang eg. if I press down it takes about 10 seconds for the cursor to move down,

Ease · 17 Aug 2009 at 16:08

I have this problem as well. I never use WMC now, I just access the libraries directly through the Xbox 360. I heard a few people say that this could be solved by using a Wired network, but it didn't help for me.

Frapple · 17 Aug 2009 at 16:21

Check CPU usage on PC, Media Centre/Player are both set by default to download information about content from the internet.

Both wmplayer.exe/ehshell.exe maxed core #0 for 20-30 minutes before I gave up and turned it off.

Can't remember exact location & can't check at work - I'm sure google won't mind helping though.

FutileBreadMachine · 17 Aug 2009 at 16:26

Wow, I never knew it could be such a resource hog. I thought it must be something to do with the album covers since the main menu where you choose Movies/Music/Settings is fine, just when I get into the music menu with the mosaic of albums it dies. I'll try disabling the auto downloading thing tonight and let you know how it goes in case anyone else has this problem.

IAmATeaf · 17 Aug 2009 at 16:44

I get crap performance just browsing any media folder on another machine using Windows Explorer across a wireless network. Both Vista and W7 seem to pull over a lot more data then simply a file/folder list which is why it seems to hang, no idea if this is the reason why MC is hanging though.