[Chris Gohlke]

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fe...ontent_consoles

"There are a bunch of solutions on the Internet today for streaming media from your PC to your console of choice. But that doesn't mean all of them are good. In fact, you'll never know whether a given tool works for you unless you spend the requisite half-hour installing it, configuring it for streaming, firing up your console, trying to connect to your PC, et cetera. It's a process. But at least allow us to do our part in reducing your streaming nightmare. We've rounded up a batch of our favorite freeware applications for streaming media from a PC to a console, as well as a handy encoding tool in case you still can't get your huge movies to work just right."

While I've found the idea of transcoding all my DVD's for streaming across the network.  I've frankly found the whole process a bit frustrating.  There are just too many different formats and none of them work on everything.  But if you are interested, this article covers the Combined Community Codec Pack, ps3mediaserver, orb (which I used for a while), TVersity (which I never seemed to be able to get to work), and GOTsent.  The one I had the most success with (even though it is not listed here) is Handbrake.  Any other tools you think are better? 

[Chris Gohlke]

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fe...ontent_consoles

"There are a bunch of solutions on the Internet today for streaming media from your PC to your console of choice. But that doesn't mean all of them are good. In fact, you'll never know whether a given tool works for you unless you spend the requisite half-hour installing it, configuring it for streaming, firing up your console, trying to connect to your PC, et cetera. It's a process. But at least allow us to do our part in reducing your streaming nightmare. We've rounded up a batch of our favorite freeware applications for streaming media from a PC to a console, as well as a handy encoding tool in case you still can't get your huge movies to work just right."

While I've found the idea of transcoding all my DVD's for streaming across the network.  I've frankly found the whole process a bit frustrating.  There are just too many different formats and none of them work on everything.  But if you are interested, this article covers the Combined Community Codec Pack, ps3mediaserver, orb (which I used for a while), TVersity (which I never seemed to be able to get to work), and GOTsent.  The one I had the most success with (even though it is not listed here) is Handbrake.  Any other tools you think are better? 

[Stinger]

I haven't found anything better than Handbrake. I've found that ripping to H.264 provides the best cross-platform compatibility.

Handbrake isn't perfect but it combines a good set of presets with an easy-to-use UI and the files are encoded very efficiently.

The fact it's free seals the deal for me. I've wasted a lot of money on video encoding software packages and I've eventually been disappointed with all of them.

[srsabu]

For manually processing files Handbrake works great.

I have TVersity setup to ease xBox 360 access to rips/downloads on my Windows Home Server, and it worked well out of the box with minimal tweaks.