Codecs supported by 360

One of the things I like the least about the 360 is the lack of DivX and XVID support. I understand why they don't currently support them but I really think they need to add them if they really want people to upgrade to Media Center and use the 360 as an extender. One of the MCE dev team posted this on the forums today which I found interesting:

We (Microsoft's Media Center Extender team) are aware of the collective desire for xvid, divx, real, h.264, etc. As much as our development team wanted to support these (and other) codecs, it was not possible to do that and still provide a high quality experience in the time we had available. Supporting these varied and often changing codecs would have required a significant development effort. Additionally, there is significant legal and business work required to run 3rd party codecs on Xbox 360.

We are listening and we are aware that support of these codecs is a compelling feature for some users and are constantly evaluating features for future versions of our products.

With luck it's not just smoke and mirrors to stop people from whining and they will eventually consider adding additional codec support.

I also noticed this comment regarding audio formats, though I haven't tried the suggestion to see if it actually works:

It should actually be possible to add support for additional audio codecs on Media Center Extender if people in the community wanted to make it happen. Check here: "Audio formats: Other formats for which a DirectShow decoder is installed and registered on the PC" So, if the proper DirectShow decoder is installed & you can get the file to appear in the WMP music library, you shold be able to get this to work. This works by decoding the audio on the PC to a raw PCM format, which is then streamed to the Extender (Xbox 360 in this case) Info on DirectShow for anyone so inclined.

Additional Video codecs cannot be added in this way.