Streaming video to your TV via your console

I read about the PlayOn Media Server on LifeHacker last week. It’s software that runs on your Windows computer and streams video to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The PlayOn Media Server streams content from YouTube, Netflix Instant Queue, Hulu, CBS, and ESPN.

The PlayOn Media Server demo works for 14 days and I’m almost half way through the demo now. Since downloading the demo, I’ve been able to stream a couple of episodes of 24 (from Hulu), some random and mostly useless YouTube videos, and watch a movie from my Netflix account.

Each video source shows up as a folder in your video sources. Then you drill down through various categories and show title folders to get to the videos. There are several TV clips, TV episodes, and Movies available from each video source.

However, not all videos that appear on my console as playable actually play. At the nearly same point in both of this week and last week’s episodes of 24 at about 12-15 minutes remaining, both streams became unplayable. I even tried starting over from the beginning on the following day, but the videos still hung at the same location. I’ve had other errors such as that when accessing videos from Hulu using PlayOn Media Server.

The XBOX error that shows is:

Unplayable Content warning
The connection to your computer was lost. Make sure your computer is turned on, connected to your network, and running media sharing software.
Status code: 53-C00DF238

The video quality appears to be near standard definition (480p) with the videos that I’ve watched. I haven’t seen any videos on any of the PlayOn Media video sources tagged with HD, yet.

The PlayOn Media Server costs about $30 (maybe $40 now) for a version license. The license is good until the next major release of the software.

Another software product of a similar nature that I’ve been keeping my eyes on is boxee. Boxee is in beta now and there’s no Windows client, yet. I’m hoping that they will eventually support Xbox 360, but it doesn’t seem like they are working on code for consoles in the beta. The beta appears to be targeted to just personal computers.