Thread: Unlock Your Xbox 360's full potential

If your like me you love your 360. You use it for just about everything.



This is what I currently use my 360 for most with a few fun things to try on occasion as well

Most of this is pretty basic but like I said these are the features I use most. Hopefully some of you out there go and try these features out if you haven't because they're really quite awesome.


1. Play Games. This is the obvious. There's the normal games on a cd, the downloadable games on the marketplace. You can play the campaign or take advantage of the wonderful Xbox live system. This is probably why you bought your system so enjoy it. It's simply remarkable!

2. Play Music. This part of the 360 I believe gets undercredited. I love my Xbox for playing music and there are multiple ways of doing this.

First off the biggest advantage to using the 360 as a music player is the stereo system it's hooked up to. My 360 is hooked up to the best system I have and sure beats my computers speakers. I do not need to spend my money that I don't really have on an expensive receiver when I can just use my xbox

a. Play off of removable storage. This is as simple as plugging in your drive to the usb ports, going to the my xbox category on the

dashboard, selecting the music tab, and finding the device from the list.

b. Play off of the 360's hard drive. Just transfer the music from the removable drive to the hard drive and your set. Do this in th

e settings tab and under the storage options.

c. Play connecting to windows media center. This is not my favorite method of playing music as I find it inconvenient to use but it

is still a neat feature. I'll post a link for these instructions. Set up a Windows Media Center Extender device

d. Play using windows 7's play to function. Probably my favorite way to play music. This is a really neat feature allowing you to

find a song in your windows media player library on your computer right click it and select play to xbox 360. Presto! music will stream on your home network from your computer to your 360. Here's a link on how to set this up. How to Use Windows 7 Play To�

3. Play video. This is another of my favorite features because I do not have to burn my files onto a dvd to view them on my normal tv. There are also many ways to do this and are almost identical to playing music. For some of these you will need live to download the codecs to play most files.

a. Play off of removable storage. The same as music. Avi files work fine however subs do not work this way.

b. Play off of windows media center. Another method without needing to move the drives.

c. Play using windows 7's play to function Again my favorite way of doing things because this way supports .mkv files as well. A

great way to instantly stream the movies from your computer to the 360.

4. Annoy your friends. A fun prank to try. Sync your controller to a friends xbox then come back to there house without you knowing and turn on their 360. They turn it off turn it back on. This is great in a dorm setting where it's a lot less stalker like. It will annoy the crap out of them and they won't figure it out for a while.

5. Use The New "Apps". While they're not the greatest in terms of functianality give them a shot. The Zune program is worthless imho because you can't play music off it if you have a zune pass. This would have been awesome!! But the facebook and lastfm apps are worth checking out.

6. Give Your Home a Space Heater. Can't afford an expensive space heater. Buy a 360 it'l heat a room up by a few degrees really quick :)

7. Connect. The live system is great I'll be in parties with my friends even if I'm not playing a game just put on the wireless mic and I'm talking to friends from wherever. Also if you use the zune software a cool feature is being able to view what your xbox live friends listen to on their zune software.

8. Use the Visualizer... Creatively. when you play music you've got the visualizer. What's great is that you can control it. Even with the music off this is very amusing on weed. Simply dazzling on shrooms. Mind-blowing when rolling. And potentially horrifying when tripping on salvia.

9. Other Ways To Stream. I'll make a new category for this as otherwise each one could go under both video/audio

a. Tversity. A very useful feature indeed. Stream all sorts of media from your computer to your 360. Able to subscribe to video

sources online RSS and more worth checking out. Able to convert video formats on the fly for 360 compatibility

b. PS3 Media Server. Another useful streaming software. I have not used this though and the homepage says only basic 360

support but I'm sure it has enough support to increase your streaming options.




Well those are the features that I love to use. Please add what you like to use it for below or correct any errors I may have made above. I'm quite interested and I'll probably add it to the list. My goal is to make this into an in depth thread explaining all of the 360's great potential.

Good tutorial, you could also add Tversity to the streaming possibilities list. That's a great program that I use all the time for Laptop-> 360. It also lets you stream youtube and hulu.

another good streaming proggy used on the laptop is ps3mediaserver it cant be used for 360's as well

Could mods do more then changing gameplay?