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[roveer]

I have been reading a lot concerning the MCE Extender capabilities of the xbox 360 and I have a few questions I hope can be answered.

I'm not much of a gamer, but looking at the 360 to work as a multi-media device and the gaming is icing on top (maybe I'll actually enjoy the games). Roadrash on the Sega Genesis was my last foray into gaming.

I have several hundred 4.3gb dvd rips stored on a large array (2tb) which is accessable from MCE PC.  I want to be able to drop a device at each TV in the house (HD or SD) and give a nice interface to all of those movies and give DVR capability as well.  Building a MCE PC for each TV is no good and putting MCE video on a regular TV and also my Sony projection TV is a miserable experience so I'm turning to these new devices to help.

I understand that the new xbox is a MCE Extender, but I have also been reading that if you have installed "MY Movies" on your MCE that it will show up on the xbox 360.  This sounds a little strange to me.  I want to make sure that the xbox is not just pushing the screen video across the network to the xbox.  I would imagine that the picture would be miserable looking.

This brings me to my second point.  How does the picture look?  I'm only going to do this if the picture looks as good as a local DVD player hooked to the TV.  If it doesn't I'm going to wait until January for the DVICO TVIX HD-5000U which does the same thing (streams saved DVD's)

Also very important, if you have ripped a DVD (let's say The West Wing) which has multiple episodes on each disk, thus requiring you to be able to do menu navigation on the DVD, how does the Xbox360 handle that?  If there's no DVD navigation, then again, it's a non-starter.  

Finally, if I have 300 DVD movies on my MCE 2005, then how does the xbox 360 represent the content?  Same as the MCE box? with icons and album art etc.  This is where the TVIX box falls down a little.  They are still using file names to represent each movie.  Something that would really make their product better if it had a better UI.

MP3 streaming I'm not so interested in,  I'm a sonos user so I have all my music pretty much handled, although I might use it since some of the systems would be hooked to audio systems.

So help me out if you can.  I appreciate your responses.

Oh, this thing plays games too?

Regards,

Roveer