If you’re one of the growing many who own a Xbox 360, you have the opportunity to allow Microsoft to extend the audio, video and picture media on your computer over your TV and home theatre. This is done with an almost one-click process via the software called Windows Media Connect (WMC); all it requires is you to be running a copy of Windows XP SP2.

Viewing your pictures and listening to your music collection via WMC is a snap; the one annoyance when it comes to viewing video has been the restriction to only being able to view movies in the Windows Media Video (WMV) format. Finally, a solution:

TVersity: WMV transcoding for the Xbox 360 is here

Here is an early preview for the on the fly WMV transcoding feature for the 360. Since we have other stuff that needs to make it into the next release and since this is not yet ready we are releasing a patch.

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Start TVersity, go to the 360 and browse your computer for videos. You should now see all the videos shared via TVersity plus all the online video URLs and assuming your directshow has the filters needed to decode these videos they should all play on the 360.

Transcoding isn’t a perfect solution – simply building in support for codecs like DivX and XviD would be preferable – but hey, might as well put that high-powered PC of mine to use in transcoding over to the WMV codec for the Xbox 360 to see.