Can I play HD movies on Xbox360 through a hard drive?

[spongebobbigunit]

So, I was at my cousin's yesterday and he hooked up an external hard drive to his xbox360 through USB and played a movie. I've got a 360 too, and I want to do the same. I've also got a HD tv, but no HD burner. Could I download an HD movie, copy it to an external hard drive and play it in HD by connecting it to the 360 using USB?

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Assuming it was copied in HD format and all your settings are correct on the XBox and tv, I don't see you having any trouble. Was your friend's tv HD and was it an HD movie?

[hawkburn]

Remember that HD files themselves are HUGE (well, by todays standards anyway.) They're totally uncompressed, so an entire movie your looking at around at least 20-25 GB. But I don't know of many HD movies that are on hard drives at the moment, unless you have a blu-ray or HDDVD drive reader, which you said you dont.

[cheekcha]

if the movie is in WMV format, you will have no problem.
The other stuff you can do, is stream the movie from you computer with programs like:
Transcode 360 (http://www.runtime360.com/)
In this way, if you computer can play the movie (DivX, xvid, mkv,h264, mp4, etc), and if is powerfull enough to transcode the movie to WMV, your xbox 360 can play it :).
You will need offcourse, your computer and the xbox 360 connected to the net, or your home network.