Free Global Television on you xBox360 courtesy of the Internet

I recently stumbled across as sweet little application called Connect360 from the company NullRiver. Connect360 allows you to essentially turn your OS X Macintosh into a media server that the xBox360 can access and stream video and audio directly to your television. How is this awesome you ask? Well if you are like me, you enjoy the BBC show Top Gear, but living here in the ole USA, broadcast television does not carry it. What is a fan to do?

What I have done is gone out and found a 2 sweet little applications called TVShows and Transmission. These two open source, free applications combined with Connect360 turn the combination of your iMac and xBox360 into a sort of illicit super TiVo.

Open up TVShows and enter in the name of any number of popular television programs then quit the application.

TVShows has now set up a background process that will periodically search the dark sections of the Internet for the shows that you have entered. In my case, when a new episode of Top Gear appears, TVShows finds it then notifies Transmission to go ahead and download the show and save it to a folder on my computer.

The next step is Connect360, once installed one needs to simply select the directory of movies to share with the xBox. As long as your Mac and xBox are on the network, you are done at this point.

Go over to your xBox and at the Media->Video blade you will see that you now have access to your movies folder, as well as itunes video and iTunes music (through the audio blade).

The quality and performance of video streamed to the xBox is great and my wife and I quite enjoy using this setup to watch most of our television now. Viewing the newest episode of FireFly on hulu.com using the office computer is not quite as satisfying as viewing it down in the den on the HD bigscreen.

Verdict, NullRiver has done a great job with Connect360 and MS has done equally as well with the xBox360. The two combined with a good source of divx or h.264 videos (TVShows + Transmission) turns your gaming rig into an excellent on-demand entertainment center.