Since I got my XBox 360 recently, it’s become a central part of my home entertainment. Not only am I playing games on it, but I’ve hooked up the media extender to a Windows 7 RC PC. The PC has my MP3 and movie collection on it. This means that instead of having the PC in my sitting room and watching on a monitor or creating a cable nightmare, I can stream the media over wifi from the PC to the XBox and then onto the TV.
I was up early yesterday morning and I was going to watch the second half of a movie I’d yet to finish. I fired up the Media Center connection on the XBox 360 and it failed, saying I hadn’t logged in. Being an engineer I went about diagnosing. The XBox and router were restarted. I verified the XBox was on the wifi. I verified internet access was OK via the PC and that the XBox was talking to the PC. But why the hell did the XBox 360 want to talk to XBox live for an internal operation like streaming a movie from my PC to the XBox?
I went onto the XBox status page. It took an eternity to load and eventually I learned that there was a scheduled maintenance window that would last up to 24 hours. Why the hell didn’t we get a notification? I saw someone posting that Gold members did get a mail. I sure didn’t. I know if I brough our hosting service offline without telling our clients I’d get the boot.
Anyway, on Twitter, “whoisaaron” sent me a link. There was another link from there to the XBox Live Operations blog; a new site. There I read the following regarding the media extender failing to connect to a Windows 7 pre RTM (beta or RC) media center PC:
“You’re getting an error that states ‘This game requires a connection to Xbox LIVE’.
This requirement is unique to our pre-release operating systems such as the Windows 7 Beta. Released OSes like Windows Vista – or Windows 7 when it ships later this year – do not have this requirement. If you were surprised by this, we’re sorry.
Again, to be perfectly clear: the final version of Windows 7 will not require a connection to Xbox LIVE to use the extender functionality”.
So, you should have been OK with XP or Vista.
Surprised me too. And I have 2 XBOX’s that I use for TV as well. Good thing the wife wasn’t home cause this would have been the last straw. Should would have told me to toss the mediacenter out the window…
I did get a message via the Xbox message interface that was labeled "LIVE" and said it would be offline on Tuesday. I think I got it two or three days ahead of time. (This was in the US.) I am using Media Center on Windows 7 connected to my Xbox, so that did catch me by surprise too.