I’m going to take a quick break from film editing (well, I’m actually neck deep in After Effects doing titles, Rick and Woody are editing) to tell you about a neat little application we came across that lets you play video from your Mac on the Xbox360.

It’s called Connect360 and it basically lets you watch vide, look at photos and listen to music on your 360 via ethernet cable. It’s real handy for watching quick edits of the film, but we also use it to watch downloaded TV shows (you’ll need to update the Xbox to watch anything encoded in DivX). It’s nowhere near as good as XBMC for the old Xbox (and now PC, Mac and Linux), but it does play high-def H.264 (but only if the bit rate is below 12mbps) so that’s handy for us. There is another peace of software out called Rivet which is supposedly better (and cheaper) but I haven’t tried it yet.

I don’t buy into the whole PC Vs. Apple thing (because PC is clearly better) but we did try doing it the Microsoft way using Windows Media Player 11 on a PC running XP SP2, but it wouldn’t ever see any media (not even MP3s). And I hate to admit it, but Connect360 and the Mac worked straight out of the box.

If you know of a better way, I’d like to hear it. I’ve used MediaPortal, AppleTV (I have a brand new one for sale if you want it) and XBMC so far, and I think XBMC is clearly the best (but can’t play HD unlike the other two).