Sometimes I have a housefull of toddlers, and there are only a few ways to keep them quiet for a contiguous block of time. One of those ways is to put on an animated movie, usually from Disney or Pixar.
Thankfully I have the entire collection of kid movies on my multi-terrabyted Synology NAS. I use my Playstation 3 to stream the movies from the network and show them on our 60″ Sony TV. The PS3 has much more codec support than the Xbox 360, which plays nearly every format I’ve thrown at it.
I discovered a weird problem the other day when I took my 360 downstairs for some gaming. It appears that once the Xbox 360 is on, then streaming stops on the PS3, with a message of “the content cannot be played”. The movie will play again, but will only last a few minutes before the same message.
I did some troubleshooting, and streaming is just fine if the Xbox 360 is off or if the network cable is unplugged. There appears that the 360 is trying to estable some sort of “active” connection with the UPnP part of the Synology NAS server, and kicks off any other devices.
This is really annoying because I still want to stream some movies on the 360 — the PS3 can’t play any of the HD-WMVs I have on the network. For now I guess we can’t watch movies and play games at the same time.
