Windows 7 is Console-Friendly

Microsoft's Windows 7 is shaping up to be your console's best friend. According to a Release Candidate report on the new PC o/s, Windows Media Player 12 looks set to let game players stream media to their Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 consoles in a seamless fashion; something which previous iterations of WMP didn't do very well.

No longer will you have to install special REG files to 'trick' Windows into streaming video to your PS3 or XBOX 360. And no longer will you have to use UPnP media servers like TVersity that transcode video, severely reducing quality and cause unnecessary CPU load on the server.

Nope, all of this should ideally work out of the box. That's why we obtained an advance copy of Windows 7 RC from Microsoft, and put it to the test! We tested streaming capabilities of both the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3. The 360 streams video with both UPnP (using the dashboard to browse files) as well as Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Center Extender format, so we tested it both ways. The PlayStation 3 streams through UPnP.

File formats supported at this time included Xvid/DivX, Apple's .mov standard, MP4 and AVCHD.