Last updated on July 1, 2026
Tonight Danielle and I watched The Lives of Others. There are two notable things about this.
One, it’s an excellent film. Probably one of the best I’ve seen in a while.
Two, this movie was rented via Netflix a week ago, but I ripped it using HandBrake because Danielle wanted to return it. Dropping it into ~/Movies and playing it on my Xbox 360 via Connect360 worked out very well. Ripped at an average bitrate of 1500kbps with 2-pass encoding, turbo first pass, and no deinterlacing (samples of the movie in the transcoder GUI showed this to be unneeded) they played just fine and looked to be of the same quality as movies played using my upscaling OPPO DV970HD (photo gallery retired).
Xbox360 and Connect360 are some of my favorite things. Handbrake for ripping DVDs, or VisualHub for converted acquired video files.
But, my Connect360 and Xbox360 stopped talking last week, and I haven’t been able to figure out why. Been waiting for my wife to come home from training in KC to test with her macbook. Because, at this point, I don’t know if it’s the Mac or the Xbox.
For what it’s worth, I’m just using version 3.23 on 10.5.2 on a Mac Pro, and the 360 is whatever the latest version is of things.
What about it isn’t working for you? I’d previously had a bunch of problems, up until the ~christmastime Xbox 360 update.