and an XBOX 360 and am wondering how I can connect them to my Logitech Z-5500 speakers.
I was going to try optical from the 360, but I am not sure whether games and DVD all provide digital. I am even less sure about connecting the TV to the speakers. The TV has an optical connection, but does that mean it will always be audible? What I mean is will the TV output digital sound via optical if a TV show or whatever I am watching doesn’t support it? I am pretty clueless about this kind of stuff so any advice would be helpful.
and an XBOX 360 and am wondering how I can connect them to my Logitech Z-5500 speakers.
I was going to try optical from the 360, but I am not sure whether games and DVD all provide digital. [/quote]
You can go directly, the 360 will ouput the different formats as a digital signal. This can be 2-channel PCM or Dolby Digital 5.1 for example and your Logitech speakers will decode it accordingly.
This is only necessary if you want to play the TV sound through the Logitech speakers. The speakers in the TV can be disabled in the menu of the TV (see the TV’s manual).
The show doesn’t need to support it, the TV will take care that the signal is output digitally just as the 360 above.
However I am not certain that you can connect 360 and TV at the same time, or do the Logitech speakers have two optical inputs?
You should be able to figure this out from the writing on the package which usually has English beside Chinese, just go to any of the bigger 3C / electronic stores and head for the wall with all the cables.
However do check if the connector on the 360 and speakers are identical, there are “mini” and normal connectors on optical cables. Or get one that has adapters included so you are more flexible, I bought one not too long ago (bright green color).
If you’re in Taipei, head down the computer market, as they’re about half the price there compared to the 3C shops.
The so called “mini” connectors look somewhat similar to a headphone connector, as in they’re long and thin, but I doubt either device use it.
The Xbox 360 I know for sure has what is known as a Toslink connector and it’s square wit ha little sticky outie bit in the middle which is the actual optical cable.
Don’t waste your money on an expensive cable, since as long as it works, the quality will be no different, the only minor advantage of some of the more expensive cables would be that they might be somewhat more flexible, as the cheap ones can be a bit stiff. Whatever you do, don’t bend the cable, as that’ll ruin it.
Got it. Connected the XBOX 360 to the speakers and it sounds great. Was worried for a while cos I could not hear middle channel, but silly me… a loose wire. Works well with HDTV. Now need to figure out if I can play XVID discs on the 360…
Got a USB drive?
Stick a movie on it and as long as you have recently (in the last 6 months or so) updated your Xbox 360 software, it’ll work, just go to the blue menu section (can’t remember what it’s called right now) select video, USB device and it’ll work. I use it more for movies than games if I’m going to be honest…
Its a Media Server Software that you install on your PC, which is in the same LAN as your Xbox360.
You then select folders on your PC, that you want to share via the media server in your LAN.
Your Xbox360 can then access all the media (movies, mp3, photos) on your computers hard disk to playback it on your HDTV… No need anymore to copy stuff onto USB disks, or burn onto CD/DVD etc.
Another great thing: TVersity will automatically re-encode media files on-the-fly, if they are in a file format that the xbox is not able to play… E.g. if you try to play an OGG file directly on the xbox360, it will not work because this file format is not supported by the Xbox… If you access the same file via TVserity, it will be re-encoded on-the-fly to mp3, and then streamed to the Xbox…
Given a very strong PC, you can even to this with MKV files, which will be re-encoded to WMV…
Well, in general, you don’t need it any more and you don’t need the USB key, as you can just stream from a normal network shared folder on your PC.
TVersity is CPU hungry and sluggish to use and is crash prone imho, but sure, it does re-encode on the fly, but it’s hardly needed these days unless you’re downloading MKV or OGG files or something else less mainstream.
Since the new firmware I haven’t had any problems playing back anything I download, but I had a lot of problem with TVersity as half of the time the PC and the Xbox 360 wouldn’t see each other.
