I recently attempted to get media from my PC playing through my Xbox 360, to use it as a media centre, but quickly found that the Media Centre Extender on Windows Media Centre Edition and Vista, wasn’t allowing me to play DivX or Xvid encoded video clips.

As it turns out, you can’t actually do it through the Media Centre Extender, but you can get them to play through the Videos Share bit instead (a quick update is needed from Xbox Live – it should trigger when you first try to download the player). It’s obviously not as pretty as the Media Centre Extender, but it works perfectly well and that’s the most important thing.

I’m lead to believe that the reason for this is that the Xbox team have put support for playing these codecs in via their dash, but MCE doesn’t use any of this, as it is written by it’s own team as they are completely separate products.

Is it going to get fixed in the future? Apparantly not. Best start saving for a proper media centre pc!