UDFS?

chaosof99

Hey guys,

I own an XBox 360 which I enjoy very much and tomorrow the Fall Firmware update for the system will roll around. As one can read on the blog of the Microsoft XBox team, the update includes "Added support for video playback from UDFS formatted USB devices".

I have tried to research UDFS but the only thing I could find was the optical media format UDF (universal disk format) which I doubt to be the same. Can anbody tell me what UDFS is and how or what for to use it, perhaps in conjunction with an XBox?

Apreche

I have never heard of this file system before. I imagine it is a special file system designed for the 360. Maybe it's the same file system that is used on the 360 hard drives? Maybe it's a typo? Maybe the are talking about UDF, and they put an S to be confusing?

Usagimaru

Google tells me that it's a User Defined File System...but there was only really one site (no wikipedia page) that I found. From what I gather, it's just a general term for any file system?

chaosof99

Well, let's see if my XBox will recognize my external hard drive tomorrow evening.

Usagimaru

I just found this blog FAQ from Xbox 360 Fanboy. Apparently you can start (if you couldn't already) using a FAT32 USB HDD to play videos and other content. It also explains a lot of the video updates for the new update.

chaosof99

Thanks Nar.

I just ordered a second Maxtor 500 GB USB Hard drive. I already own the same model and am very satisfied with it, but for some time now I wanted to reformat it to FAT32. Does anybody have a good utility program for Windows witch which I can format more than 32 GB to FAT 32? I found one from Ridgecorp but if anybody got a better one I'll take it.

Apreche

32 gigs is the maximum size of a fat32 partition. Also, there is no reason to be using fat32 except for maybe on a USB thumb drive. It is old and busted. Do not use it.

chaosof99

From what I have read is that FAT32 is able to format file systems larger than 32 GiB, but Windows integrated formatting does not allow for bigger partitions:
Link1
Link2

I know that FAT32 is old but apparently it is the only file system I can use for this.

...

32 gigs is the maximum size of a fat32 partition.

According to Wikipedia you can have 8 TiB volumes with FAT32. A lot of software just doesn't let you create volumes larger then 32 GiB. Depends on the blocksize, or whatever it's called.

Apreche

32 gigs is the maximum size of a fat32 partition.

According to Wikipedia you can have 8 TiB volumes with FAT32. A lot of software just doesn't let you create volumes larger then 32 GiB. Depends on the blocksize, or whatever it's called.

Ooh. You don't want to change the block size. That is a bad idea. Let me teach you about block size.

Let's say I've got a hard drive that is 10 megabytes. Now I set the block size to be 1 megabyte. I put 10 files on that hard drive. Each file is one byte. That hard drive is now full. No matter how small a file is, it will always use at least one block. My guess is that FAT32 has some limit on the number of blocks you can have in the file system. Sure, you can make the block size huge, to make the file system bigger. However, you might end up actually filling up the hard drive faster because small files will take up these huge blocks of space.

Some amount of tweaking of block size is a good idea though, as long as you don't get extreme. If you have a hard drive that's going to contain all videos, having a larger than default block size is not a bad idea. It will be faster, and you won't lose much space since almost every file will be using multiple blocks.

HMTKSteve

I remember when I purchased Civilization 2 and it came with some information on disk usage.

The info sheet stated that they could not tell you exactly how much disk space the game would consume because they had a lot of small graphic files that would quickly eat up space on a hard drive with a large block size.

The inverse problem is that if you set your block size too small the drive can not access all of the drive space because it can not index them all. This one in the day of 210MB drives so some of this may no longer be valid.

chaosof99

I haven't gotten my hard drive yet, but I pretty much got done what I wanted to do.

Through Windows Media Player 11, you can share your media with your XBox360 and have it stream. So now I am able to watch anything I download on my TV

I will still try to get the hard drive working with my XBox once it arrives, since I don't want to maintain another media library and don't want to have my laptop running all the time and/or use my bandwith for other things.

...

Through Windows Media Player 11, you can share your media with your XBox360 and have it stream. So now I am able to watch anything I download on my TV

Eh, you can do that with a cable from computer to your TV. And then you can show anything on your TV, like your desktop. And you'll be able to stream H.264 video, mkv's, ogm's and all the other stuff WMP doesn't support.

chaosof99

Yes, with a TV-Output that my laptop doesn't have. And hey, why use a set up LAN if you can buy another cable and span it right across the room?

Also, I think I got enough strings attached to my TV with a Wii, an XBox 360, a video recorder (yes) and a satellite receiver hooked up to it.

Apreche

I'll just say that having the XBox or the AppleTV connected to the TV is good. Having an actual computer connected to the TV is a zillion times better. I suggest it to everybody who watches things. I think in a decade or so, most people will have some sort of general purpose computing device connected to their entertainment systems.

chaosof99

Scott, I would gladly set up a media PC (with MythTV running on it) and use it with my TV if I had the time and resources for that, but I think it is always better to use existing and available technology rather than pouring money in projects that aren't clear to be finished in a timely manner. In fact, I believe you guys stated something similar in an episode a few months back

BTW, I think "Building a media PC" would be a good topic for a Monday show

Apreche

BTW, I think "Building a media PC" would be a good topic for a Monday show

Buy Mac mini. Buy S-Video adapter. Plug it in.

am_dragon

This is just a quick "here is MythTV" video I threw together to show a couple co-workers. It's kinda dark but you mostly see what I'm doing. I really want to do a series on building, installing and configuring MythTV (and learning to use manual focus). I have a week off after Christmas so I'll try to start then.

So has anyone tried this 360 divx thing yet? Will it play HD Divx files? I guess I'll go try it and report back. Reporting back, what a horrible experience. I can get the 360 to see 1 of 2 computers running WMP11. Unfortunately it's the 6 year old laptop with a 40GB hard drive, not where I store my media. I tried everything. I even called Microsoft, they suggested connecting the PC directly to the 360 to get it to work. I said "If I wanted to do that I would just connect the computer to the TV and be done with it.". I pointed out that this should be super easy. The guy said "I agree, this feature has caused nothing but problems. We get calls asking us to troubleshoot connections between PC's and 360's that's not what we are trained to do, and there is Vista, WMP11, Windows Media Connect, it's a mess.". So after about 3 hours of trouble shooting and testing I'm done. I have a MythTV box, I thought perhaps I could stream A/V to another TV with the 360, but apparently not. Oh and for the record, I have 1 computer running MythTV right now, I have the MythTV frontend on my laptop working, and an old Xbox running XBMC with the MythTVXBMC script to stream live tv from Myth to my Xbox. All of that was more straight forward than connecting the 360 to WMP11.

. I think in a decade or so, most people will have some sort of general purpose computing device connected to their entertainment systems.

I'm not holding my breath but I'd rather see one video format, on physical media or via download. One codec to rule them all.

chaosof99

Sorry to drag this one up again, but I just wanted to get this out. I got my new 500GB external hard drive today and reformatted it to FAT32 using the utility I mentioned before. For some reason it didn't work on the first try but on the second try "CHKDSK" gave me no errors. I then put some testvideos on the hard drive and plugged it into my XBox 360 which recognized it easily as a portable device and also played the videos on it.

All in all it was pretty easy.

Omnutia

I found a refference to UDF on the DVD-RAM page of wikipedia:

Windows Vista is able to write to both FAT32- and UDF-formatted DVD-RAM discs right from within Windows Explorer.

Somewhat related question: I am thinking of getting some DVD ram discs so I can easily put anime onto discs for friends and was wondering what kind of drive do you need to use the cartridge ones as it would be a great way to stop discs getting scratched and I could watch an episode and then put it onto DVD-RAM without having to collect the whole set (laptop hard drive).

Oh fk, I didn't think that through, If I get the cartridge discs how is anyone else going to read them..

F this, I am not paying £100 for a drive.

...

I found a refference to UDF on the DVD-RAM page of wikipedia:

Windows Vista is able to write to both FAT32- and UDF-formatted DVD-RAM discs right from within Windows Explorer.

Somewhat related question: I am thinking of getting some DVD ram discs so I can easily put anime onto discs for friends and was wondering what kind of drive do you need to use the cartridge ones as it would be a great way to stop discs getting scratched and I could watch an episode and then put it onto DVD-RAM without having to collect the whole set (laptop hard drive).

Oh fk, I didn't think that through, If I get the cartridge discs how is anyone else going to read them..

F this, I am not paying £100 for a drive.

Eh, DVD-RAM != Safe storage. Use a DVD-RW. DVD-RAM is 'used' as normal RAM, slower, temporary data storage. I see no use in them at all. RW = win for just getting data from point A to point B. It's also not a good way to store data safely though.