XBOX 360 Wire

Exclusive : YouTube arrives on Xbox 360 (Review & Interview)

YouTube has landed on 360 thanks to a nifty little program for Windows based PC’s and laptops.

We received information on the product last week, from developer Bryan Fleming. He asked us to give YouTubeDriver a spin to see what we thought.

To be honest, watching YouTube on my 360 never really crossed my mind - nor did it have instant appeal when I first heard about it. But, in setting it up and giving it a run through I was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Later in the week, we’ll have an exclusive interview with the developer so keep your eyes peeled for that. In the meantime though, here is a quick guide to YouTubeDriver and some snaps of the results. You’ll quickly find that it’s what you choose to watch, that determines the overall experience.

Setting Up

For the moment, YouTubeDriver only works with Windows based PC’s with Internet Explorer and Media Sharing enabled. I work from a mac most of the time but luckily there’s another XP SP2 laptop to hand. The first step after running the setup.exe file is to enable media sharing so that your 360 can see whats on your PC. I remember this being a long drawn out exercise but was delighted to find the only thing I had to do was to enable ‘Media Sharing’ in Windows Media Player. Activating the driver on-line took seconds though you won’t need to do this if want to take advantage of the handy trial version. Took all of 2 minutes to get this done - happily.

Viewing YouTube on your 360 

First, you need to choose what you actually want to watch. Remembering a BBC News story earlier in the week about a hit YouTube clip ‘Battle at Kruger’ I set about getting hold of it to see what all the fuss was about.

The first step is to take your browser to the YouTube page containing the video you want to watch. Click pause on the video to save bandwidth. Now just click on the YouTubeDriver icon in your tool bar and choose where you want to save the clip. My Videos is the usual suspect.

Once you decide where to dump the video, YouTubeDriver will go off to the website and download the source direct from YouTube itself. The core of the application is the way it converts the original file into something that your 360 can read. This is all done automagicaly without any intervention from the user once the download completes.

As you can see, there are a few steps involved in getting hold of the media, and the conversion process itself. To keep going back and forward watching one clip at a time may become laborious - the trick is to download everything you want at once and watch it all back later.

Viewing on the 360 

Anyone already linked up with Media Sharing won’t have any trouble here. It’s exactly the same process as viewing a video from your PC - the conversion is already done, so the 360 just sees the file as a normal WMV clip. Here’s some snaps of the output.

In Conclusion 

It works - and surprisingly well too. Video quality is as you would expect from a YouTube clip - but the overall image is pretty good considering you may be viewing on a 32″ screen. Battle at Kruger is a great choice for testing if you want to trial the application. At $49.99 (about £25), some light users may want to hang off for a more refined version, but if you have the money to spare I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to YouTube users who want to show those work funnies to the folks over dinner.

If you want to help support Xbox 360 Wire, You can purchase YouTubeDriver here (affiliate link). If not, you can visit the site directly here instead.

Posted by Bleem - August 12th, 2007 -