Xbox 360 using Media Center refuses to play Xvid .avi files

I've been using the 360 as a video extender to view video files on both a USB external drive and a hardwired LAN PC hard drive for months with no problems. However, when I set up a video server with Vista Home Premium, I can get the videos to play (poorly - that is another issue, as they play fine using Media Player) on the PC through MC but through the Xbox running MC I get an error message saying the file is the wrong format.

The files are Xvid flavor of .avi which the Xbox natively likes. I've shared the drive and folders (but not individual files) on the server.

Any suggestions as to why the files won't play through the Xbox (and perhaps why play slowly and jerkily through MC on the PC while they play fine inder WMP)?

TIA.

xvid avi files don't play through the Media Center Extender.
They will play through the dashboard's video player.

The Media Center Extender does not have the same video codec support as the
dashboard's video player.

[gehuali]

Is this a known problem, Jason, and is there any solution? Is the lack of .avi codec support in the WMC software on the computer, or in the WMC extender software on the Xbx 360 itself?
Is it worth contacting Microsoft's WMC team/ The Xbox support has no idea about codecs, at least judging by 3 or 4 tries.
Too bad as .avi files are common and MS is/was hoping to increase WMC use and acceptance.

{No .avi video playback on Xbox360 using Vista WMC exender .AVI files run fine directly on an Xbox360 and run fine on the Vista computer using Windows Media Center, but will not run from an Xbox360 accessing the MC computer through Vista Windows Media Center Extender function.}

Yeah, leaving out the codecs for Canon camera video (.avi) and Kodak camera video (.mov) doesn't seem too bright. I was wrong, even with .avi and .mov videos running on a FAT32 formatted HD directly attached to the Xbox 360 USB input, I get the "incorrect codec" error message. So may be an Xbox360 issue entirely, and not the WMC Extender software. Hard to know as I've got no way to try another extender like the Linksys DMA2100, etc. So far the Xbox support staff I've tried don't seem to know exactly what a codec is so not much help.

late reply.......We have Vista Home Premium and a new XBOX 360 .....BUT what I did was to convert ALL our home .avi videos to .wmv format. Personally I think this lack of functionality is really stupid. I love WMC with our new XBOX 360. After a couple trial video conversions I let it run overnight to convert several hundred avi's. No problems now. I chose to bite the bullet and purchase a converter program for $39.

I use Transcode-360. It converts your DIVX and XVID files on the fly so that
you're 360 can play them when using it as a Media Centre Extender.

Its also free!

This isn't an error or issue for ms, the 360 has been brought out lacking
these codex and a lot of other features because ms doesn't want them in the
360 yet (or isnt going to put them in at all). There are lots of thing with
the 360 that were not enabled, for example you can rip an audio cd (convert
an audio cd to mp3's on the hard drive) but you cannot directly copy mp3's
from a data cd to the hard drive. Easly add on the 360 but removed for
unknown reasons (making our lives harder). same with a flash disk. Which is
why alot of us have had to resort to media sharing anyway (which isnt much of
a problem, just anying sometimes). Who knows why they've done this

We're consumers ms, we like options! Make our lives easier like your add's
say!